NATURE AND PLAY: PARENTS ATTITUDES TOWARDS CHILDREN'S RECREATIONAL ENVIROMENTS

Play is an important and inseparable part of growing up. There is strong scientific evidence that natural environments provide excellent opportunities for children's play and development as they offer a countless number of qualities, i.e. diversity, creativity, wilderness. However, nowadays children have less and less opportunities to play in natural surroundings. One of the reasons of this situation is the parents need for control and anxiety about their children's safety. The aim of the paper is to present recent findings on children unstructured play. A sample of Polish parents revealed their opinions and experiences towards nature and play taking part in a questionnaire survey. The results indicated that parents perceive contact with nature as valuable part of their children's development and would like them to spend more time on outdoor playing. In this context, the idea of natural playgrounds in cities have the potential to be a compromising solution, which could be implemented while creating new playing environments for children.