“Inside Kids Cannot Possibly Get the Exercise They Need.”
“Inside Kids Cannot Possibly Get the Exercise They Need.”
Unpacking the conservative Christian ideology embedded in 1000 Hours Outside.
When lockdown hit in 2020, A., a mom of two who lives near me in New York’s Hudson Valley, had a five-year-old and two-year-old. “My kids are very physical,” she says. “We were living in a townhouse with no yard and every playground around us had shut down. My children were literally bouncing off the walls.” And making holes in them. A. didn’t want to destroy their rental, plus her next door neighbor complained constantly about the kids’ noise. “If my kids knocked over a Magnatile tower, he’d be banging on the walls and calling the landlord,” she recalls. In desperation, A. declared them all “feral woodsmen” and made a rule that they weren’t allowed indoors between 10am and 5pm. “I was like, ‘I need to make Being Outside my new job,’” A. says. “I approached it like a job, and it definitely felt like one.”
Every morning A. made the same peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, put the same Goldfish crackers in baggies, filled all the reusable water bottles and packed it all up with the same juice boxes, Clif bars, diapers, changes of clothes and assorted other gear. Then she would drive herself and the kids off to various hiking trails. Our part of the Hudson Valley has a lot of beautiful hiking, but also: Trails were the only place to go. “We just kind of existed out there,” she recalls. She would hike with her toddler on her back and her backpack of snacks and diapers on her front until her five-year-old got tired of walking. Then they’d play Uno or A. would unpack some action figures and matchbox cars to entertain them. “We dug holes. Beat trees with sticks. There were idyllic moments like mud pie sand tadpoles and the whole Hudson Valley spread beneath us at the triumphant peak of Popolopen Torne,” A. says. “But there was also a lot of just sitting around literally waiting for the sun to move through the sky.”
A. didn’t invent her outdoor lockdown lifestyle. She was executing the vision of 1000 Hours Outside, an Instagram account with over 669,000 followers, a blog, and “a movement to reclaim childhood, reconnect families and live a fuller life,” all started in 2013 by Ginny Yurich, a homeschooling mother of five in Michigan. Before Covid, A. was loosely aware of 1000 Hours Outside, but classified it as the same kind of “aspirational parenting” as cute bento box lunches. “It seemed like if I were able to get my shit together enough, that would be the kind of thing I would strive to do,” she says. But once lockdown began, she joined the official Facebook group and started to dig in. “It was very, very attractive to think that maybe if I just gave my kids more ‘wild,’ it would fix something,” she explains, remembering the allure of 1000 Hour catchphrases like “the wild calms the child!” “It was attractive to think there was a solution that was within my reach at all.”
If you are a millennial parent of a certain demographic—maybe especially if you hail from a very nature-y place, where everyone camps and rock climbs and wears fleece, like the Hudson Valley or Colorado or California—you have likely seen some #1000hoursoutside content, either directly from Yurich, or from a mom you know, cheerfully setting some 2024 Family Intentions. That intention is exactly what it sounds like: To spend 1,000 hours outside per calendar year. Yes, that is over 41 entire days. Or if you average it out over 365 days, 2.7 hours outside per day, every day — no matter the weather, no matter your work schedule or school schedule, or health status. Of course Yurich doesn’t expect people to spend nearly three hours outside every day, or to pack up their families for a camping trip that lasts as long as Noah lived on the ark and Jesus wandered the forests. Instead, she teaches families to track their time using elaborate coloring page-style charts or an app, and to plan for days when they can spend four to six hours outside, to make up for the days when they have to do less.
A. chafed against the tracking expectation almost immediately: It was hard enough just getting outside every day with her kids and all their gear, she didn’t need to come home and color in worksheets too. Then she started to realize just how many 1000 Hours Outside fans were also homeschoolers like Yurich. “The message became: Actually, all the systemic problems of American parenting can be solved by YOU, Mama,” A. says. “Just quit your job, stop having any needs or wants of your own, and never, ever, ever, stop striving to reach external metrics of achievement.”
This attitude isn’t just a vibe A. was getting from a few judgy commenters; it’s baked into the movement’s entire ethos. We talked about 1000 Hours Outside on the most recent Indulgence Gospel because several of you asked: Wait, is this a diet? And the answer is a clear yes, as I explained on that episode. But when you all began sharing your own 1000 Hours experiences in the comments, I realized the whole phenomenon was a much bigger story and started to dig in. And I learned 1000 Hours Outside is not just a diet—it’s also conservative Christian propaganda masquerading as a trendy parenting philosophy.
If you’re new to the 1000 Hours concept, your first question is probably: Why ONE THOUSAND hours? This is so many hours! Bethann noted in the comments on our podcast episode that 1000 hours converts to 41 days, which suggests it may be a rounding up of the 40 days and nights that Jesus spent wandering the wilderness, and that Noah spent on the ark. Yurich is a Christian, and her most recent book Until The Street Lights Come On is published by Baker Publishing Group, a Christian press that serves “the diverse interests and concerns of evangelical readers.” (Other titles in their line-up: The Toxic War On Masculinity, Becoming The Woman God Wants Me To Be, and Are We Living in the Last Days?). But Yurich doesn’t lead with her Christianity when marketing 1000 hours, though it’s there if you’re paying attention. Instead she cites “science,” by way of Charlotte Mason, a British educator born in 1842 who believed that children should spend 4 to 6 hours outside “on every tolerably fine day from April to October.”
Mason was in some ways progressive for her time, believing that all children should receive an education regardless of social class. But her educational philosophy now forms the basis of a popular Christian homeschool curriculum. There’s also the fact that she educated children over a hundred years ago, in a time before computers and widespread car ownership, or any modern understanding of children’s social and emotional needs.
Yurich’s other primary source is Angela Hanscom, a pediatric occupational therapist and founder of TimberNook, a company that develops play-based outdoor education programs for schools, camps, and individual providers. Hanscom describes her programming as “research-based,” but the research cited on her website is just one study on 12 children. It did not collect data on how many hours the children spent outside, only evaluated the quality of their play in different environments. Nevertheless, Hanscom regularly advises “at least three hours of free outdoor play time” daily. But there is no scientific basis for deciding to spend 1000 hours outside in a year versus 200 hours versus 3,000 hours. As I broke down in this piece, we don’t even have good evidence supporting a specific daily time allotment for physical activity in general, let alone whether it needs to happen outside or not.
To her credit, Yurich is quick to say that undertaking a 1000 hour challenge is much less about hitting that goal and much more about getting any amount of additional outdoor time. “Even if you lose, you win!” she says often in reels and podcast interviews. But Yurich also works in frequent little admonishments about the cost of doing less: “If three hours a day is a baseline, we risk shortchanging our children if our goal is only three hours a week,” she writes. And on the project’s about page: “[1000 hours] seems insane, maybe—we get it. But did you know the average American child spends 1200 hours a year in front of screens? Now THAT seems insane to us.”
The guilt trips, the colorful trackers, the reels that pair footage of kids playing in beautiful locations with sober warnings about what’s lost when we don’t let our children roam free —it all combines to give 1000 hours a gravitas the concept hasn’t earned. And the result is a widespread anxious obsession, for many of Yurich’s followers, with hitting their target. A. came across suggestions to go outside and then get kids into their snow gear. “They’ll be like, ‘life hack! It takes so long to get them all suited up, that’s an easy way to get 20 minutes more without even thinking about it!!!” she says. “I”m sorry, but I cannot imagine anything that would make me or my kids more miserable than getting into snow gear outside in the freezing cold snow.”
Over on Reddit, 1000 hour anxiety is especially rampant among parents who don’t homeschool. “For daycare/school age kids do you count potential outside time at school? I was thinking roughly an hour a day? Is that cheating?” wrote one mom. (The commenters quickly informed her that most daycares and schools are not getting kids outside for a full hour a day.) Another parent asked how to clock so much outdoor time with a toddler who is still crawling and thus, not ready for a ton of open terrain. Yurich herself jokes about how often she’s asked what “counts” as outdoors: Does a screen porch count? Does driving with the windows rolled down count? Does standing near an open window during a rainstorm count if you don’t have good raingear? And most contentious of all: If you go camping, do the hours you spend asleep in your tent count? Yurich seems to think they don’t—but she also enjoys stoking that debate.
Diet culture trains us not to trust our own judgment, and to worship metrics (calories counted, steps tracked, pounds lost) over our lived experiences. Motherhood, especially in the early, most physically grueling years, makes many of us feel wildly aware of how much we can’t control. You can’t make the baby nap; you can’t make your preschooler eat vegetables; you can’t count on your government for any kind of structural support or protection of basic rights. But dammit, you can get everybody outside for a while, and later, meticulously color in the time that took on your rainbow chart. I mean, unless the toddler refuses to put on his rain boots and you never make it out the door at all.
And the diet mentality of 1000 Hours becomes even more explicit when I began sifting through Yurich’s various arguments for undertaking the challenge. In a post called 100 Reasons to Spend 1000 Hours Outside, she states: “Unstructured play outside gets children moving, which is extremely important in light of the current childhood obesity trends.” Once again, no actual evidence is cited. Yurich does occasionally reference personal experience: “I was a chubby kid. Not enough to where it affected my health but enough to get teased here and there,” she writes. “As early as the third grade, I envied the skinny girls—and also my little brother who, to this day, has legs to die for.” I wonder how those early experiences of being told her body was wrong contributed to Yurich’s determination to track and excel—she not only tracks her family’s outdoor time, she also tracks her reading habits and tracks 1000 miles moved each year, and lately she’s also gotten into rucking (carrying a weighted backpack while you hike because…getting outside wasn’t hard enough?).
In the blog post where Yurich shares her personal story, she’s quick to cut to the chase: “Inside kids cannot possibly get the exercise they need.” The children pictured on Yurich’s Instagram are not chubby. An oft-repeated mantra is “kids are built for movement.” In the 1000 Hours Outside official Facebook group, A. reports posts of kids hanging from monkey bars, showing off visible muscles, with captions like, “1000 Hours kids are just built different!” Ostensibly “built different” means kids who spend a ton of time outside are tougher, more resilient, and maybe also more creative, more curious, less screen-dependent—all of which already feels more than a little judgmental. But when the community combines their celebration of those traits with only one body type, they reinforce fatphobic ideas about good and bad bodies—and good and bad kids.
The diet culture of 1000 Hours Outside isn’t explicitly about weight loss. This kind of anti-fatness is part of a larger privileging of certain bodies (thin, white, able-bodied) and certain lifestyles as righteous and morally superior to others, which comes directly from the Yurich family’s interpretation of the Bible. “Diet culture runs deep in the American Christian Church,” says
, an anti-diet dietitian, Christian, and author of Feed Yourself: Step Away from the Lies of Diet Culture and into Your Divine Design. “It makes sense that [the Yurichs] feel that this is a holier way to live because it’s how they live. And there’s an unacknowledged and assumed privileged that ‘people should be able to be just like me.’”Indeed, 1000 Hours Outside regularly ignores the very real privilege involved in being a person who can spend hours per day outside. This takes financial privilege: Somebody has to buy all the right gear for every activity; somebody has to have the flexibility to not work or work in ways that support these lengthly outdoor adventures; and somebody has to pay for travel to expensive locations judging by the kinds of outdoor experiences celebrated on Yurich’s Instagram. There is also ableism at work here: Not everybody can just go for a walk, let alone swim or hike or ski. And there is also white privilege underpinning it all: Black and brown families are often not safe or welcome on hiking trails and in other public outdoor spaces. “When we picture a homeschool family barefoot in streams, we picture a white family,” says Liberatore. “Which is ironic when we can see the effect that white supremacy has had on the earth and nature all around us.”
When Yurich does speak to these concerns, it’s with a quick “don’t worry! any outdoor time is better than none” and “it doesn’t have to be perfect.” These mantras sound scrappy but they are rooted in an ethos of “no excuses;” not doing it isn’t an option when you can always just keep trying your best to do better. This tracks with the messaging of a church that doesn’t let wives leave abusive marriages and wants to pray the gay away.
In theory, Yurich’s personal and political beliefs could stay entirely separate from her public work promoting outdoor experiences — but these beliefs seep in, rather persistently. Yurich’s secular fans began to connect the dots about her politics when she hosted Greta Eskridge, author of Adventuring Together on the 1000 Hours Outside podcast. Eskridge is a self-described “happy wife, mother to 4, homeschooler, adventurer” and “porn fighter” who is also affiliated with Focus On The Family, an alt right organization that produces evangelical radio programs and podcasts, while also offering marriage and family counseling services that are explicitly homophobic and anti-trans. Followers in the 1000 Hours Outside Facebook group and on Instagram asked Yurich to take down Greta’s episodes and received no response. (For more on this particular saga, check out Ash Brandin’s saved highlight about it.)
, a parent who writes about homeschooling, unschooling and education on , was not surprised by Yurich’s radio silence. “She now has a following around the world, and yet does not explicitly talk about what she’s really about: Raising children in a Christian manner,” Liberatore wrote me. Or rather, Yurich does not explicitly talk about this on the 1000 Hours platform. But Liberatore reports that Yurich’s politics are well-known in homeschool circles (which often divide into fundamental Christian and progressive unschooler camps), and pointed me towards an article Yurich wrote for the Exodus Mandate Project, where she reflects on the “sexual and crass conversations” she overheard among students during the five years she worked as a public high school teacher: “…sending a child to public school is like sending them to an R-rated (or worse) movie, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year,” Yurich says in the essay. In contrast: “Homeschooling families offer a safe haven to their children.” You know, safe as long as their children aren’t gay, trans, or hoping to make their own reproductive choices.More recently, Yurich’s husband Josh wrote a blog post on the 1000 Hours Outside website called “What Is Health Anyway?” where he talked about their family’s participation in Samaritan Ministries, a membership-based healthcare sharing organization “where Christian families literally share one another’s burdens” by paying each other’s medical bills. Sounds almost socialist, but don’t worry: To join, members must submit a letter from their pastor confirming their faith. They must also agree to “abstain from any sexual activity outside of traditional Biblical marriage as designed by God between one man and one woman.” Abortion and gender-affirming healthcare are, obviously, not covered.
Looking back, A. says what she appreciated most about 1000 Hours were the community’s practical tips—snack ideas and snow gear reviews—and the general feeling that she was less alone on “this grim Sisyphean march, heading out to go nowhere.” But as lockdown dragged on, she chafed against the “aggressively positive” tone of 1000 Hours content, which didn’t ever allow for the possibility that a kid or a parent might just want…to be inside. “It’s okay to not like being cold! It’s okay to not like rainy days! It's okay to not want to be in a place where wolf spiders are under every rock!” A. says. “It felt disingenuous and performative to pretend otherwise. It was like there was no room for the kids or the parents to be full, complete humans.”
It felt that way, because it was. You can’t let your kids hate rain and spiders when going outside is a performance of your family’s moral superiority. To be clear, this isn’t a de facto or universal Christian perspective: “In my opinion, this type of counting/tracking removes one of the most important tenets of the Christian life—an autonomous connection with self and God,” says Schilling, who also writes
. “Not only is it scripturally wrong, it’s shaming, blames individuals for the harms of oppressive systems, and denies that body diversity is divine.” But tracking time outside, miles moved and all the rest is consistent with the Yurichs’ larger goal of controlling their kids’ experience of their own bodies and the world. Their faith rests on the premise that our children’s innocence must be safeguarded in our own private Edens and that their unruly bodies must be contained and controlled in order to be kept safe from the corrupting influence of messy humanity. And when the outside world seems that dangerous, it makes sense that simply leaving your house would become a habit to track, measure, and judge.
I had never heard of this movement, what a great post. What struck me was how toxic individualism is such a centerpiece. It’s about how much YOUR kids are outside, it’s about how close YOU get to your goal, rather than thinking about structures and policies that would make being outside more accessible to all. So many cities and towns have closed off avenues for kids to ever do things on their own, like be at parks or pools. So inherent in these goals is that a parent is always available to supervise this “wildness.” This is something I’ve written about a lot https://open.substack.com/pub/thedoubleshift/p/what-the-summer-camp-frenzy-costs?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Reading about this is really wild to me, as a Christian who doesn't live in the States, I think my faith means something very different than this. I don't find my religion chafes with my socialist, progressive or fat-positive beliefs at all— in fact, it informs and grounds them. My faith has been a huge part of releasing myself from fatphobia and disordered eating. I feel kind of devastated reading about the abusive marriages and controlling parenting that Virginia mentions. I hope this is cool to say— I really don't believe that Christianity and Christians have to be like this at all.