The Challenge with Challenges

Just over two years ago, I stumbled upon the 1000 hours outside challenge. I think it was while I was starting to research homeschooling, but its possible it was in a parenting group or book club too. We decided it would be a great thing to try for our family. We downloaded the app, we set process goals, we joined the Facebook groups, printed the tracker, made a Pinterest board of outdoor ideas and a maps thread of places to hike. We really tried to bring out focus to spending time outdoors.

A trend that I noticed in the Facebook groups, was that this challenge was extra hard if you were the kind of family who's kids went to school, and who had parents both working full-time out of the house. In retrospect, that makes sense because you have so many hours of your life already dedicated to being other, often indoor places. I had expected our challenge to be more to do with the fact that we live in a city and our yard is small. Even still, we hit the end of 2024, our first year attempting the challenge, with a total of around 750 hours--- not bad for a first attempt!

The next year, I was really sure that we could do it this time! I was prepared to work with some of our challenges, like being outside pregnant and having a new-born, and as we switched to homeschooling I thought we had this challenge in the bag! Other people in discussed whether they wanted to count certain things: "Does it count if we're in the garage, but the doors are open? Does it count if we are sleeping in a tent? Does it count if my kids are outside but I am not?" Obviously, the way your family answers those questions might depend on the reasons you're doing the challenge.

The number of hours in the goal, 1 thousand, comes from that being the average number of hours children are spending on screens per year (Though my most recent chapter in the Anxious Generation suggests its encompassing even more hours of their lives, and possibly every waking hour if we factor in the time they are thinking about their social media despite not being on it.) and so I was hesitant to include any hours that included tech for us, which would be geocaching or picnicking at the drive-in movies. I wanted to know that our screentime was FAR LESS than our outdoor time, and it felt like the overlap didn't help me prove that, despite knowing my kids probably haven't watched a screen for 1000 hours in their entire lifetimes yet.

In the end, we decided that we would count outdoor activity even if it involved tech, we would count hours sleeping in a tent (because a bear could totally shred that tent if he thought Moose's PBJ smelled good enough...), and, in the second year, I switched from counting hours where a majority of us were outside, to tracking only when I was outside. On any given day, my kids are more likely to want to get out than me. On the days they're at daycare or visiting family, they get to help take care of farm animals, explore the yard, and climb trees. I decided it was easiest to count my own hours, and even if the kids time didn't quite equal out with mine, it was benefitting them in two clear ways. First, I am more emotionally regulated when I have spend time outside, which makes it easier for me to help them solve their problems, finish their schoolwork, get their chores done and basically just everything. Second, I decided that my modeling the idea that getting outside is important for ones body, mind, and self, they would still see it as a family value.

Then, I signed us up for even more challenges that would OVERLAP with our goal of making it 1000 hours outside. We were going to attempt to do 52 hikes, 200 miles on the Erie canal, etc. I figured if we were spending all this time outside anyway, at these places that are near us, we would be able to get to them no problem, and it would feel good to succeed at multiple challenges rather than just one. We joined groups on Facebook with names like 'hiking for patches' to find out where we could receive tangible rewards for our efforts.

Then, I thought about our other values! My husband and I both love to read, and it's not a secret that we've taken a very literature-focused approach to homeschooling our children. They have no limits when it comes to listening to audio books, borrowing from the library, and we even let them stay up late when they can argue that their book is too good to put down (We've all been there, right?). Plus, I figured there was no reason we couldn't be doing our reading challenge outside, so that it also overlapped with our 1KHO challenge. We signed up for summer reading, and we set an additional goal to have Mason (our toddler) read 1000 books, not before kindergarten, but in a single year.

Here's the part where I have to be honest- we didn't complete nearly any of these challenges. Our total number of hours outside was far less than it had been the year before, we logged almost no miles on the canal, and I honestly have no idea how many hikes we took. Similarly, I had trouble tracking how many books Mason had read. While its typically between 6 and 10 every day, I got somewhere close to 300 and then just really lost interest in coloring in all the little boxes. They did turn in their summer reading papers to the library!

I also had set challenged for myself. Maybe its my competitive spirit, maybe it's the way I find looking at data interesting, maybe I felt like saying "but its for my challenge!" justified some of the time I spent working on my hobbies rather than my housework, but I didn't make many of those either. I had set my book total to 50, and ended with 47 (Could I have squeezed in three more? Probably, but I decided it was more important to enjoy them.) I had planned to make a quilt block for every book read so that at the end of the year I had enough for a blanket, and I made three before losing interest in that project and getting caught up in others. I had set a goal of playing a certain number of board games a certain number of times- that also didn't happen.

All of this is to say, that there were a lot of things we thought we could do, but it divided our focus. I also realized after the fact, that the challenges that were long-term had periods where we were into them and periods where we weren't. It was hard to stay focused, as a family, for such a long-term goal. This year, we're changing it up and breaking each goal into a monthly goal, that keeps us on-track or ahead of the overall goal, and helps us think of things in more manageable chunks. (Writing this on Jan 15, we have spent 14 hours outside so far this month, which is right about where we want to be!)

I think challenges are a great way to motivate yourself or your family, but I will be hesitant to over-commit, or to include any that require me to be doing intense levels or tracking on a daily basis.

I'm hopeful that this is the year we make it to 1000 hours, but I will continue to not stress it if we don't quite make it. Feel free to let us know what challenges have worked (or not) for your family, and what you plan to do this year, so that we can cheer you on from afar!