How outdoor play benefits children’s imagination & an exciting opportunity to get your kids outside!

Excited opportunity to get your child outside, wandering and wondering!

Mosey is an official sponsor of the Merck Forest Hike-a-Thon!

This Saturday, October 3rd, 2026, take the whole family to Merck Forest for a beautiful walk in the woods. The leaves are popping, the trails are well-marked, and there will be lots of kiddos to keep each other busy!/

You can check out the details for the event here.

In case you missed our introduction last week, Club Minutes is a new series from the Mosey Outing Club. Here, we’ll be sharing well-researched stories that make the case for raising a child outside.

Amid all the noise about what children need to know, learn, practice, and achieve, we’re hoping to offer something simpler to hold onto: a felt understanding of why a childhood spent outside matters.

Today’s installment is all about imagination.

The moments when you hear a little voice from the next room, whispering a tale about fantastical creatures and epic adventures. A whole dialogue between characters in a made-up world. The stuffed animals have become a family. A blanket has become a cave. Leaves are sailboats. A cardboard box is, somehow, a spaceship.

These are the stories that seem almost impossible to conjure in the adult brain. And maybe that is part of what makes childhood feel so otherworldly: the ability to look at something ordinary and see something else entirely.

Albert Einstein is often credited with saying that “imagination is more important than knowledge.”

Whether or not the exact attribution holds up, the sentiment is worth lingering on. Before a child can build something, solve something, invent something, or imagine a world different from the one they’ve been handed, they first have to be able to see beyond what is already there.

Where Does the Outdoors Fit In?
Richard Louv, the journalist and author who popularized the term nature-deficit disorder, writes that “whatever shape nature takes, it offers each child an older, larger world separate from parents.”

That idea feels particularly relevant now.

So much of childhood can be carefully structured. Even play can start to feel like something we need to facilitate correctly. One of the most compelling things about outdoor play is that it doesn’t come with an instruction manual.

The outdoors is full of objects that don’t tell children what they are supposed to do with them. A fallen tree might be a balance beam, a fort, or the boundary between one imaginary country and another. That open-ended quality gives children room to imagine, experiment, and solve problems for themselves.¹

This is curiosity in its most natural form.

Creativity and Imagination Are the Foundation for Learning
Imagination leads to creativity, and creativity gives children another way into problem-solving.

This matters far beyond childhood.

According to an Adobe study, 85% of college-educated professionals say creative thinking is critical for problem-solving in their careers. An analysis of LinkedIn data has also identified creativity as one of the most in-demand skills in the workplace.³

We spend a lot of time preparing children for the future. Perhaps one of the most useful things we can give them is something much less measurable: the freedom to imagine what could be.

A child who sees a stick as a sword is practicing more than pretend play. They are taking an existing object and giving it a new possibility.

Outdoor play gives children something that structured activities sometimes cannot: problems without predetermined answers.

This is where imagination becomes something more than a charming feature of childhood. It becomes practice for a lifetime of making, adapting, questioning, and creating.

And perhaps most importantly, the child doesn’t know they are practicing any of it.

They are just playing.

Let Them Make Something Out of Nothing
Maybe this is one of the quiet gifts of giving children more time outside.

We can give them a patch of grass, a handful of sticks, a puddle after the rain, and enough time for boredom to turn into something else.

This is the part we can’t really schedule.

Imagination needs room.

It needs time without an immediate answer. It needs objects that can become many things. It needs a little boredom, a little freedom, and the permission to follow a thought simply because it is interesting.

And the outdoors, with all its unpredictability and possibility, offers this in abundance.

A Childhood With Room to Wonder
When we give children room to wander, we are giving them room to wonder. We are reminding children that the world is not finished. That things can be looked at differently. That there can be more than one answer, more than one possibility, more than one way forward.

A childhood spent outside gives children a world they can help invent.

And for a little while, before the world tells them exactly what everything is supposed to be, they get to decide for themselves.

That is imagination.

And that, we think, is worth protecting.

Sources

1. Purdue Global, The Importance of Outdoor Play in Early Childhood (2025). https://www.purdueglobal.edu/blog/education/benefits-outdoor-play/

2. Bento, G. & Dias, G., The Importance of Outdoor Play for Young Children’s Healthy Development (2017), Porto Biomedical Journal, 2(5), 157–160. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2444866416301234

3. Krueger, Nicole. “5 Reasons Why It Is More Important Than Ever to Teach Creativity.” ISTE, October 5, 2022. https://iste.org/blog/5-reasons-why-it-is-more-important-than-ever-to-teach-creativity