A friend of mine voiced the opinion that it is important for kids to spend much time in nature. I always viewed claims aspiring to tell us that we should do something 'because it is natural', 'because that's how we did it always', etc., with suspicion. And not without any reason.
You often hear claims like: 'we should eat food X because it is natural food for us and our ancestors ate it always, and they never had cancer', or that 'in my time kids used to play outside a lot and ... [insert your favorite beneficial outcome for your life]'. There are three problems with such claims.
First think about it this way: evolution is a slow process. Most of the features of our body have evolved a long-long time ago (tens of thousands of years ago) and have changed little. Our basic structure is the same, our basic bodily functions (blood circulation, digestion, hormone transactions, etc.) are the same. And our ancestors have lived a very different life from ours. So, our body is basically not really 'made' for the sort of lives most people in second and first world countries live.
Nevertheless we live much-much longer and healthier lives than did our ancestors. Thanks to the development of moral skills and cultures we aren't killed by other humans at first sight, stronger individuals cannot just simply take what is ours or kill off our kids, males don't regularly rape females, we don't have to use physical violence to get our food, and so on. And thanks to medicine, fertilization, crops growing, vaccines and a whole lot of other inventions we are not subjects to mass early childhood death, to 30-50 years of average lifespan and so on. So, our inbuilt mechanisms aren't necessarily a good guide to how we should live.
Thanks to our basic architecture we are pretty adaptive and can lead lives substantially different from the ones our bodies evolved to live. And thanks to the lucky cultural basics we developed we did not became a fiercely competitive but a very cooperative race. Furthermore, we can now use these bodies in much-much more efficient ways than 'nature told us to', and have far greater knowledge how to gain pleasure, fight inequality, fear, depression, death and pain, than any other animal, which lives a natural life.
Second, The 'keep to the well trodden path' style of arguments deserve no credit either. What was working as a good rule of thumb ten, twenty, or fifty years ago has not much to do with what will work nowadays. Don't misunderstand me: it might work. There are social settings and economic areas where the structure remained largely unchanged since long time. Also, these rules might work due to luck. But they surely aren't rules you should accept because they worked earlier, or someone found them useful.
This does not necessarily apply to rules which pertain to personal matters, such as family or relationship matters. Since in these things it is extremely hard to get right what is beneficial both for individuals in terms of subjective feelings of happiness, security, etc., and what is good for society, plus these categories are - as we have them nowadays - almost purely social constructions, it is very much possible that a good constellation is one that we hit on earlier.
Third, what about the personal experience based views, for example when your friends say that kids should definitely start doing a part time job when they are 15, or when they want their kids to learn music, since it was such an important experience in their lives? There are two problems with these kinds of ideas: one is, that they are based on subjective thoughts formed here and now. But these thoughts do not reveal anything about the real processes that led up to the stage one is in. It does not underpin a relation between one's satisfaction with certain aspects of one's own life and the earlier experience. Also, it does not take into account all the people who had the same experience, but failed in life in all sorts of way - they ended up lonely and suffering from it, jobless, homeless, and so on.
The other problem with these sorts of views - held by everyone - is that they are very likely to be affected by cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is a psychological mechanism at work in all of us. It ensures that we have a picture of ourselves and our lives that is easy to live with. For this purpose it very often 'cheats us'. For example, if we are wrong about a factual question and someone points this out, and later we get to know that we were wrong, we like to look for explanations that suggest that the question is still open. There was a problem with the proof, with the evidence. We didn't understand the question in the same way. And so on. Everyone is good at giving excuses.
The same happens in cases of relying on personal experiences of what was and what wasn't useful for one. Most people would like to see their relatives, their partners and themselves in favorable light. So, they like to glorify and justify their methods and choices in raising them, living with them. Therefore we often adopt methods, or justify adopting method that have nothing to speak for them. Except that adopting them makes us feel better about our own lives.
Also, in many cases it might be true that it is useful to spend a lot of time outside. Kids might have hardwired, innate developmental segments which only activate or work really effectively if they receive particular stimuli. But whether this is so or not can only be decided by neurology, psychology and education studies. It is not something you should take guesses at, nor should you take advice from non-professionals.
Should we abandon all such rules of thumb? All such 'traditional' advice? I think not. The problem is, that we do not have anything better to rely on as long as we don't have sufficient relevant statistical data. Professionals in healthcare, education studies, psychology, sociology and other fields are working actively to gather such data. You can always find good books, correct websites with the most up-to-date positions, gathered and interpreted by professionals.
If possible, do not rely on journals or websites run by journalists or other non-professionals. They might misinterpret the data, or even the interpretation of the scientists. Usually understanding research results is very difficult. Don't try it yourself. Let the professional explain it to you. If you don't understand it try again, try harder. It's no one's fault. You just lack the skills and education. We all face this problem and no one is good at everything. Take your time. Ask for help. Learn a bit. And don't run to easier solutions, don't read esoteric and alternative stuff. If it seems too plausible and easy, it's probably false. And it can seriously harm your kid's or your own development.
The critical way is hard, but the only good one. See this for example.
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