Prefer a different platform? Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
Have you seen The Beginning of Life 2: Outside? If not, it’s worth your time. The documentary is available for free on YouTube and on Netflix, and has already reached millions of people across dozens of countries and languages.
This week’s guest, Laís Fleury, is the original story architect behind the film. She also leads children-and-nature programming at the Alana Foundation—one of Brazil’s most influential voices on childhood.
But her work didn’t start in a boardroom. It started—(as so much great work tends to?)—on a boat in the Amazon.
There’s something Laís said near the end of our conversation, almost offhandedly, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since:
“Children need nature. But Nature needs children too.”
It sounds obvious. But it isn’t. Because it reframes the entire argument — not just what we owe children, but what is at stake for the planet if we fail them, the child who never learns to see a tree cannot grow up to protect one.
The Amazon through the eyes of children
In her mid-twenties, Laís co-founded an expedition called Vagalumi — firefly, in English — and spent nine months traveling through the Amazon. The motivation was almost embarrassingly simple: she was Brazilian, and she knew almost nothing about the people living in her own country’s greatest forest. She’d seen the rivers on television. She had no idea about the communities.
What she found was a childhood almost impossible to imagine in a city. Kids who had never encountered a book before, but who were alive with curiosity. Kids who became the expedition’s guides — not the adults — because they were the ones available, open-hearted, and willing to show strangers their world.
The observation that stayed with her: children who grow up inside a place become its most natural guardians. Not because they’re told to. Because they love it first.
A city with a national park and schools that don’t go outside
When she became a mother and started looking for schools — first in São Paulo, then in Rio — she found something that stopped her cold.
São Paulo, where nature is genuinely hard to access, had schools actively building nature programs. Rio, which has a national park inside the city and the ocean on its doorstep, largely did not. The assumption seemed to be: nature is out there. Children will find it.
They don’t. Not anymore.
The childhood she describes — the one most urban children are living right now — unfolds across three boxes. Home. School. The vehicle that connects them. Recess, where it exists, runs fifteen minutes. In those fifteen minutes, children have to eat. Free play, unstructured time, the experience of being outside with no particular goal — these have become rare enough that they have to be deliberately designed back in.
The consequences are not abstract. Myopia rates are climbing. Childhood obesity is rising. Depression and anxiety in young children are increasing. And an entire generation is losing what she calls real experience — the experience of being physically in the world. Climbing. Falling. Getting muddy. Getting bored. Getting curious.
Richard Louv (who featured heavily in the documentary) called this “nature-deficit disorder” in 2005. Laís’s work has spent the years since making it actionable.
The ROI that fits in a puddle
When people tell her they have no budget for nature — no park nearby, no green space, no resources — her answer is disarmingly practical.
It rained last night. There is a puddle at the corner. Take the child outside. Let them touch it. Ten minutes of contact with nature per day, she says, is already an investment in physical health, cognitive development, mental health, and spiritual development. It doesn’t require a national park. It doesn’t require a bus. It requires someone who has decided that this matters.
One of the most striking examples in the documentary is almost absurdly simple. Two children sailing on a dam in an industrial part of São Paulo — not a lake, not a reserve, a dam — and describing the freedom they feel. A toddler playing in a puddle with complete and utter fascination. A girl from Mexico who visits a patch of green and says: here I feel like I can breathe.
These are not children who have been taken somewhere extraordinary. They have been given fifteen minutes and permission.
One teacher. One school. One policy.
A public school teacher in Brazil had a small budget and a large conviction. She didn’t get more money. She redirected the money she had — from inside the classroom to outside it. She invited parents to contribute what they could. One brought sand. Another brought old tires. Together, they built a natural playground from almost nothing.
That playground became a model. The model became a municipal policy. Every school in that district now has a natural playground.
This is not a story about funding. It’s a story about priority. Once the priority shifted, she could suddenly see resources that had been there all along—the parents with skills. The materials going to waste. The patch of asphalt that could become something else.
She puts it simply: when you prioritize nature, the ecosystem around you changes.
The reciprocal argument
There is a version of the children-and-nature argument that is entirely about children. Their rights. Their health. Their development. That argument is strong and true and important.
But the argument I can’t stop thinking about is the other one.
If children grow up connected to the natural world, they become adults who care about it. Not because they were lectured into caring — because they loved a tree, or a puddle, or a boat on a dam, and that love went somewhere. The most durable form of environmental protection isn’t regulation. It’s people who feel, in their bodies, that the natural world belongs to them and they belong to it.
No child who has never been outside will fight for what’s outside.
Geof Donovan, in a previous episode, made the case that trees are survivable infrastructure. Laís makes the case that children are the long-term strategy. Both of them are saying the same thing from different angles: the natural world is not optional infrastructure, and nature connection is not a soft outcome. It is the whole point.
Episode with Dr. Geoffrey Donovan (one of the most downloaded of S7 so far!) 👇
What this means for people who build cities
This podcast is largely listened to by urban planners, foresters, and green professionals. So I want to say something to you directly.
The children-and-nature lens may be the most powerful reframe available to you right now. Not because it’s softer than carbon sequestration or stormwater data. Because it connects to something no elected official and no budget committee can argue with: parents who do not want their children to be less alive.
There is no parent, as Richard Louv says, who wants that. And the research — on cognition, on mental health, on physical development, on immune function, on the formation of future environmental stewards….is increasingly impossible to dismiss.
The playground doesn’t have to be perfect. The park doesn’t have to be close (though let’s try and make that happen!). You can start with a patch of sand, a pile of old tires, and the parents who are already there.
Happy trails,
Nadina
P.S. The Beginning of Life 2: Outside is free on YouTube and available on Netflix. The Alana Foundation can be found at alana.org.br.
Prefer a different platform? Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Sponsor note: The Bernard van Leer Foundation generously supports this season, and I’m honoured to be a Van Leer Fellow — exploring whether urban nature can truly fulfill our evolutionary need for wilderness during the most formative stages of life: pregnancy, early parenthood, and childhood. Christina’s work (hello, toddler nature groups!) sits at the very heart of that question.
