Unlocking Creativity: How Forest Experiences Enhance Child Development in the Digital Age

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Digital technology has sped up and simplified everyday life. Smartphones and tablets are now indispensable for children, reshaping how they learn and play. Still, parents who hand their kids these devices often hope they will put them down. Why? Because digital devices can make us forget important values and pull us away from direct experiences of nature.

The Korea Forest Service and most local governments operate forest experience centers for young children, forest-healing centers, forest-bathing sites and natural recreation forests. Amid growing concerns about children’s physical health and emotional development, policymakers are beginning to recognize the fundamental value of forests and to incorporate that understanding into public policy.

Forests are more than places to rest; they are living classrooms that shape children’s emotions and character. The rustle of leaves in the wind, the soft give of soil underfoot, and the seasonal changes of the landscape awaken senses that screens cannot reach. Those experiences not only soothe children emotionally but also foster creativity and social development.

To realize the full value of forests, we need more forest-welfare infrastructure. Some preschool forest-experience centers fill their calendars the moment reservations open. When my eldest was around five or six, we attended weekly forest classes. We learned the names of wildflowers we had never known and started distinguishing cicadas by their calls. We made puzzles out of plane-tree bark and shot pine cones from slingshots—the forest became both playground and classroom.

On rainy days we pulled on raincoats and walked into the woods. The rain’s percussion through the leaves and the earthy scent my child called “the smell of rain” remain vivid. When my eldest was in second grade, the homeroom teacher sent home a poem the child had written. It conveyed a pure sensibility that felt and expressed nature as it is—an expression born of time spent in the woods, not from a textbook or a screen.

Reading Park Wan-seo’s Who Ate All Those Wild Greens? made me wonder: if the author had not spent her childhood in Bakjeokgol, when tender shoots covered the ground, would we have those vivid memories and those sentences?

Ultimately, a person’s life and sensibility are shaped by the environment and experiences of childhood. That vital soil can very well be the forest.

Preschool forest-experience centers are not merely play spaces. They are nature-based educational settings where children run, discover, and grow. With trained early-childhood forest guides, children learn about nature and practice cooperation with peers, growing into healthy members of society.

In an accelerating digital culture, forests teach children to pause and slow down. Tucking smartphones into a bag for a while and listening, touching and smelling on their own offers an experience that cannot be replaced.

We should expand the role of forests beyond mere resources and treat them as culture. Let children grow up among trees, let families rest in the woods, and build “forest-culture cities” that connect communities around their forests. There is a saying: it takes a village to raise a child.

Now that village should include the wildflowers, insects and trees of the forest.