Supporting Child and Family Wellbeing through Nature during the Pandemic

The global pandemic of COVID-19 poses many unprecedented challenges on our way of life. Since the introduction of social distancing measures as one of our biggest weapons in slowing the spread of disease and mitigating the effects on the health services, other challenges have been introduced. One of these is the challenge of supporting and maintaining wellbeing in children and families. A way to achieve this is through maintaining our contact and connection with the non-human natural world. Regular contact with the natural world has been found to have benefits for our mental and physical health. The aim of this paper is to identify how families can gain the benefits of nature engagement, in the instances where the access might be limited or non-existent. Whilst we are able to identify a number of opportunities and mechanisms for nature contact and connection to promoting family wellbeing there are some methodological challenges remaining, given that a significant number of research papers exploring the affective influence of nature contact and connection focuses on adults. We also identify areas where research would be beneficial to better understand the mediating influences on wellbeing from nature contact and connection.