Nature Goals for Your Family: Ways to Get Outdoors in 2025
As we begin 2025, think back on your time in nature last year. Were there memories that you want to recreate? What challenges do you hope to take on? No matter what it is, the beginning of the year is the perfect time to start planning your family’s outdoor adventures and setting some family nature goals.
Spending time outdoors as a family is more than just getting fresh air. It is so crucially important for building strong family connections, instilling healthy habits, and cultivating a sense of wonder. Getting young children outside at an early age can instill a lifelong love for the environment as they continue to grow, encouraging and promoting earth friendly sustainable habits. Numerous studies now show linkages of time in nature with physical health, mental health, academic function, emotional regulation, among many others as listed in the Children and Nature Network’s Research Library. Setting family nature goals allows you to prioritize all of nature’s benefits all while strengthening family bonds and making memories.
How to determine nature goals for your family
Think about what your day to day looks like. What are some realistic nature goals that you can set for yourself? For your family? What are daily or weekly goals? How about monthly? Seasonally? Or yearly?
Maybe your goal is to spend 15 minutes outside every day. Maybe it is to hike weekly. Maybe it’s just to have your first family camping trip. No matter what your goal is, make sure it easily fits into your schedule and is practical based on your skills and interests. It also has to be be fun and enjoyable for you and your family.
- Ease: Look at your current season in life. What is going on with your personal schedule and what is going on with your family’s schedule? When choosing goals, it is important that it aligns with your family’s current schedule and lifestyle.
- Practicality: Focus on realistic and achievable activities. If you know that you are too busy to come up with a daily nature craft for your kids, don’t use that as a goal. Your nature activity does not have to be pinterest perfect. But it does have to be something that you can actually do and only you know what that is.
How to achieve your family’s nature goals
Especially when your family has a busy schedule, it can be easy to let your nature goals slide. Here are some tips for how to achieve the goals you have set.
- Integrate activities into your daily routine.
Have meals in your backyard or outside. Add some extra steps when going to work or school.
- Have a plan.
Create your outdoor activity lists ahead of time. Have a list of local parks that you want to visit. Bookmark hikes that you want to go on. Keep track of community events that are going on. Having some of this on hand will make it easier to come up with what to do for the day.
- Be prepared.
Have your Go Bag ready to minimize any barriers to getting out the door. Keep it stocked with water, snacks, extra clothes, sun screen, bug spray, and any other essentials.
- Be flexible.
Give yourself grace and allow for flexibility. We all know that things come up. A child gets sick or the whole family gets sick when you’ve planned a weekend camping trip.
- Keep track.
Track your accomplishments. Have a nature journal to document what activity you were able to do as you work on those goals.
Ideas for Nature Goals
If you’re having trouble coming up with some goals, you can pick from one of the ones listed below. Adapt it to what feels right for you and your family.
- Daily dose of nature.
Aim for 10-15 minutes outside every day. Start small and build up.
- Replace screen time with green time.
Work on minimizing screen time habits and opt to get some nature time instead.
- Weekend Adventures.
Spend one weekend day outdoors together. Make it a family outdoor tradition.
- Eco habits.
Create an eco habit as a family. Perhaps it is remembering to bring a reusable water bottle each time. Or it is having an extra bag and gloves to pick up trash on the trail.
- Local learning.
Learn about the local flora and fauna in your community. Incorporate nature apps like iNaturalist or Cornell’s Merlin Bird ID to capture images and sounds of what’s around you.
If you’re more seasoned, you can take on bigger challenges as a family. Some include:
Let go of perfection
Give yourself grace when aiming to get your family outside. As we know, sometimes, things happen and plans change. Maybe the park you planned on going to that day ended up closed due to Avian flu, it has happened to us. Perhaps changes in the weather be it an extreme heat wave or blizzard have made it more challenging to achieve your goals. Or where I live, an expanding wildfire leading to unsafe air quality for my young kids has caused us to pivot and adjust many of our summer camping and outdoor plans. Part of spending time in nature is learning to be adaptable as well. When you model adaptability due to setbacks, your kids are paying attention and learn from that as well.
Start your year on the right track
No step is too small when it comes to setting your nature goals. So whether your goal is 10 minutes a day or 1000 hours outside, the whole point is to spend more time connecting with nature and spending more meaningful time with one another. So, what will it be?
Now it’s your turn!
What is one nature goal for this year? Let us know in the comments!
