Pregnant Women and Their Babies Benefit from Time Outdoors

Are you pregnant or do you know someone who is? Quick, turn off your computer and get outside!

According to researchers at Oregon State University and the University of British Columbia who looked at pregnancy and birth outcomes in more than 64,000 singleton births in Vancouver, British Columbia, women who live within 100 meters of green space such as trees, lots of grass, and other plant life tend to have better pregnancy results.

In particular, pregnant women who spend more time in green spaces are more likely to deliver full-term and higher birth-weight babies. The researchers believe these positive outcomes of green exposure are related to the overall health benefits of spending time in nature, including perhaps reduced blood pressure, stress reduction and lower cortisol levels, as well as the fact that spending time in nature facilitates social support and a sense of belonging (which, as I write about in Field Exercises, has been a very clear benefit for veterans).

Perhaps this helps account for my recent delivery of a full-term, nine-pound baby? (Now you know why I haven't been posting much lately!)

Although the researchers suggest that neighborhood greenness is an important factor (probably because it allows women to easily spend time outdoors), I suspect that any pregnant woman could easily adapt this research to her own life, no matter what type of neighborhood she lives in. It may take more effort, but it would be well worth seeking out and spending time in a park or by the river as much as possible during one’s pregnancy – and afterwards, too. It certainly can’t hurt!

What I’d like to see now is a study on infant sleep and green exposure. When my son was six months old, I came to realize that the more time he spent outdoors during the day, the better he slept at night. This time around, I’m spending as much time as possible with my baby outdoors. It can’t hurt, and if it benefits her nighttime sleep, then all the better! 

Reference

Perry Hystad, Hugh W. Davies, Lawrence Frank, Josh Van Loon, Ulrike Gehring, Lillian Tamburic, and Michael Brauer. Residential Greenness and Birth Outcomes: Evaluating the Influence of Spatially Correlated Built-Environment Factors. Environmental Health Perspectives, 2014; DOI: 10.1289/ehp.1308049

Farming Together in the Buduburam Refugee Camp

Over the past few years, most of my research and conversations have been with Canadian and American veterans, but several years ago, I learned the story of a young Liberian man named Morris living in the Buduburam Refugee Camp in Ghana. Morris’s story (told in When Blood and Bones Cry Out by John Paul Lederach and Angela Jill Lederach) is another example of the ways that farming and gardening can provide an important outlet for healing and support to many former combatants. 

Becoming a Child Soldier

When Morris was 13, his father was murdered by rebels, and soon after Morris became a child soldier in the Liberian civil war. Later he also trained other child soldiers to fight in Sierra Leone’s civil war. Eventually, when struck by the realization that his fighting had turned him into an empty shell and that he no longer felt human, Morris escaped to the Buduburam Refugee Camp. As part of his own healing—from both his roles as victim and perpetrator in the Liberian civil war—and to give back to the community in the refugee camp, Morris assembled other child soldiers also living in the camp, and the youngsters built a farm together. 

Farming Together

Today, approximately 200 former child soldiers grow and harvest fruits and vegetables in the camp. All of them, including Morris, continue to carry the stigma of their former roles as combatants and many others in the refugee community continue to see them as rapists and murderers. Accordingly, the healing and recovery process for these young people is anything but easy. They have lived through horrific violence, and many have committed unimaginable acts. As Morris remarked, “It is so hard . . . All you have in your mind is violence. You have been living in violence for so long . . . It doesn’t matter where you are. It’s embedded in you. And it is creative. You can do unimaginable things, terrible things with this creativity, because you have seen so much violence. It takes willpower to transform that. Some of us are working hard to change.” 

And so as they work to change themselves, and to overcome the community stigmatization, the former child soldiers continue to work the land and work toward their own healing. The youths find comfort in both their relationships with one another and in cultivating new life together, and carry hope that the others in the refugee community will see that they have the power to change, to do good, and will one day accept them again into the community.

References:

Lederach, John Paul, and Lederach, Angela Jill. (2010). When Blood and Bones Cry Out: Journeys through the Soundscape of Healing And Trauma. Oxford: Oxford University Press.