Before I had a child, I only occasionally set foot in the many parks in our neighborhood. Now I spend so much time in them that I can tell you about every swing set, picnic table and unfenced patch of grass within a two-mile radius. Also the location and cleanliness quotient of every park restroom.
A study published Wednesday finds my own relationship with parks is part of a larger trend: Urban parks in the U.S. are largely geared toward the young, with far less appeal for adults, especially older ones. And that leaves on the table a big opportunity to use parks as a way to increase physical activity.
"You'd think that seniors would be retired and would have more time" to go to the park, but "they're not using the parks very much," says Deborah Cohen, a senior natural scientist at RAND and lead author of the study, which was published in theAmerican Journal of Preventive Medicine.
Adults ages 60 and up made up only 4 percent of park-goers, even though they're 20 percent of the population.
While the potential health benefits of public parks have been cataloged, there's been less research on describing the nation's park infrastructure. Researchers at RAND Corp. wanted to get an idea of what's currently on the ground in cities with a population of more than 100,000. So they sent data collectors into 174 parks in 25 major cities, asking them to describe the facilities and conditions, and the demographics of users during a typical week during the spring or summer of 2014.
[For more of this story, written by Katherine Hobson, go to http://www.npr.org/sections/he...parks-for-recreation]
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