By Alex Velazquez for Westgate Resorts
American parents are not confused about what their children need. They just aren’t doing it.
A New National Survey from Westgate Resorts found that 95% of US parents believe that nature and outdoor experiences are a negotiable part of childhood development. But that’s not a surprising number. What’s surprising is how little this translates into action. Only a third of those same families actually go out together more than once a week, and about 13% go out once a month or less.
The study surveyed 1,000 American parents across a range of demographics in March 2026, and the picture it paints is one of a country where intentions and behavior have almost nothing to do with each other.
Two-thirds of parents had a completely different childhood
This shouldn’t shock anyone who’s spent five minutes on a parenting forum. There’s an entire online movement dedicated to recreating a “90s childhood” for today’s kids, who remember riding bikes until the streetlights came on, drinking from garden hoses, and riding bikes until they got home before dinner. That nostalgia isn’t just a vibe. The data backs it up.
Two in 3 parents (66.5%) say they now spend significantly more time outside with their children than they do with their own children. Among Gen X parents, this jumps to 75.1%. Among baby boomers, it’s 78.6%. Only 1.5% of parents said their children spend more time outdoors than they did growing up.
The transfer is not really a mystery. Children’s leisure time Accepted by structured activities and school pressure. And the entire entertainment economy is engineered to keep eyeballs indoors. What makes this status sting, though, is that parents who had an outdoor childhood are the same people who can’t figure out how to recreate it.
Kids spend more time on screens than most adults spend at work
At least 1 in 4 (27.1%) American children log five or more hours of recreational screen time on a typical weekday. Of that group, 11.8% are clocking seven-plus hours. To be blunt: One kid racking up seven hours of screen time per day is spending more time in front of a device than the average American worker spends at their desk.
And only 6.2% of children get less than an hour of nonschool screen time per day.
It’s not just the Westgate resort that’s living in isolation. A 2025 Common Sense Media Report Screens have been found to be embedded in children’s daily routines from birth. D The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is affiliated Four or more days of nonschool screen time daily are associated with poorer outcomes for physical activity, sleep, weight, and mental health. Screens just aren’t competing with the outdoors. They have already won most of the available hours.
Predictably, this creates tension in the house. 53.5% of families argue about screen time at least a few times a month. In the Northeast, 21.7% of households struggle with it every week. The screen time debate isn’t abstract for this family. This is a recurring argument at the dinner table.
Parents feel guilty, and how they book holidays is changing.
Almost 3 in 5 (57.5%) parents say they feel guilty or frustrated about their kids not getting time outside; 30.3% called it outright guilt. Another 27.4% describe frustration because they want to fix it but can’t. Only 14.3% of parents say they are satisfied with how much time their family spends outdoors.
And that guilt is showing up in how families plan their vacations.
Almost 7 in 10 (69.6%) parents have booked a holiday specifically for nature when their children are not at home. About a third did it more than once. What’s emerging here is a new category of family travel: guilt-driven outdoor travel. These trips can range from weekend camping getaways to theme park adventures to beach vacations, but they’re all booked by parents who feel they owe their kids something that everyday life fails to provide.
The pattern is strongest among younger parents. Nearly 2 in 5 (37.9%) Gen Z parents have actually skipped a vacation altogether because they couldn’t find a family-friendly outdoor destination. For Gen X, it drops to 26.4%. Young families want outdoor trips but face a wide gap between what they want and what’s available.
The biggest obstacles are time and money, not motivation
Nearly 3 in 5 (56.7%) parents say that work and school schedules are the number one reason their families go out. And it implies that this pressure increases with income. Among households earning $100,000 to $249,000, 63.6% cite packed schedules as the top barrier. These families likely travel sports, music lessons, tutoring and a dozen other structured activities that eat up every free afternoon and weekend.
Then there are the costs. More than half (52.9%) of parents said the biggest motivation for spending more time outdoors would be affordable options that don’t require expensive gear. For households earning $25,000 to $49,000, that number hits 59.7%. Nature is supposed to be free, but between the cost of equipment, transportation, park fees, and the sheer time investment in planning an outdoor day, it doesn’t feel free for many families.
And layered underneath all of this is a knowledge gap that no one really talks about. 1 in 4 Z parents say they don’t even know where to take their kids outside or what to do when they get there. That’s more than three times the rate among Gen X parents. A generation that grew up primarily indoors is now raising the next without a reference point for life outside.
The ‘want-to-beautdoorsey’ family
Perhaps the most telling number in the entire survey: 45.4% of American parents describe their families as “wanting to live out.” This is the single largest self-identification category, surpassing families who actually consider themselves outsiders at 28.1%. Less than 4% say they are introverts and are perfectly fine with it.
So the problem isn’t that families have given up on the outdoors. It’s that outdoorness has become aspirational rather than automatic. Time, money, logistics, and a built world that defaults to indoor living have created a gap between how families think they live and how they actually spend their days.
But the data makes one thing pretty clear: Families know exactly what they want They want trails within walking distance. They want an affordable option without specialized gear. They want destinations that shrink the distance between the front door and the forest. Whether or not anyone is building to that claim is a different question.
method
The survey was conducted by Pollfish, targeting 1,000 US adults with children. Respondents answered questions about attitudes about outdoor habits, screen time, barriers to nature exposure, vacation decisions, and childhood development. Results were disaggregated by generation, household income, education level, gender and region.
This is the story is produced by Westgate Resorts and review and distribution Stacker.
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Previously published at hub.stackernewswire
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