84% of parents say nature helps young children, 33% say theirs get it daily, as Catherine commissions a study

The Princess of Wales has commissioned a study of how nature-rich places can help babies and young children learn to manage their emotions and get along with others, the Royal Foundation announced on October 16, 2026. Its own polling found that 84% of parents think time in nature supports their child, while 33% say their child spends time in nature every day.

A commission with a Cornwall partner

The Princess asked the Royal Foundation Centre for Early Childhood, working alongside expert partners, to explore how nature-rich environments, together with nurturing relationships, can help babies and young children build the social and emotional skills that the Foundation calls the basis for lifelong wellbeing. The Duchy of Cornwall joins as founding partner. Royal Central, a royal news site, describes the Duchy as Prince William's estate and says it is a founding partner of the Princess's early years work for the first time.

The project will bring together academics, early years practitioners, charities and environmental organisations. The announcement gives no budget and no timetable.

The idea has a history. According to GB News, the Princess visited a forest kindergarten in Denmark in 2022, and she has since travelled to Reggio Emilia in Italy, where she met educators, researchers and practitioners working on early childhood. The Centre's Shaping Us Framework and Foundations for Life Guide set out the developmental science of the first years, and the new project will try to apply it more ambitiously and effectively through nature-based settings.

Her public work points the same way. GB News lists her Mother Nature film series, which offered personal reflections on the capacity of the natural world to restore and inspire, and a recent essay, Creating the Conditions for Love to Flourish Through Nature & Creativity, that drew on her time in Italy to look at how relationships with people and places shape healthy development. The evidence base the Foundation cites for the new work is the Centre's own.

In a video message released by Kensington Palace, Catherine said that “spending quality time outdoors has never been more important” in what she called a tech-driven, digital age. It is a sentence that would fit on a tote bag, and the Foundation had the good sense to follow it with a research plan.

Her statement went on to describe the project as “exploring how nature, creativity and relationships can best support the healthy development of babies and young children”, and GB News reports that she spoke of a whole-child approach.

Christian Guy, the Centre's executive director, went further in the Foundation's statement. The Princess has long treated the earliest years, and the places where children grow, play and learn, as “a golden opportunity to create a healthier, happier society for future generations”, he said, and the Centre has been working with her on how it can best help “ensure all babies and young children in the UK can benefit”. He added that the visits to Denmark and Reggio Emilia had further informed that thinking, and that the project would try to understand how nature-rich environments can help nurture confident, curious, creative and emotionally healthy children.

A poll that asks parents what they already believe

The polling was commissioned by the Centre, the same body that launched the project. Asking parents whether time in nature supports their child's wellbeing is a question that is easy to answer yes to, and 84% did.

The second figure is the one that carries the story: 33% of parents say their child spends time in nature every day. Most parents would like their child to spend more time in nature, the Foundation says, and to have greater access to nature-based experiences through childcare and education.

The Royal Foundation's announcement names no polling firm and gives no sample size or fieldwork dates, so the two percentages cannot be weighed against each other with any precision. They are also what parents say, not what was measured: a daily walk to the shops past a street tree may count for one parent and not for another.

Made for Mums, a parenting site, frames the gap as an ordinary one, between what parents want and what fits around nursery runs, work and childcare. It lists simple ways to start: a local park where a toddler can handle leaves and bark at their own pace, a sensory walk for a baby to notice birdsong and moving leaves, a handful of fallen leaves to sort by colour, unstructured play with a trusted adult nearby. The site adds that these are not recommendations arising from the new research.

What 36 studies on nature-based preschools can and cannot say

Dr Nicola Kemp, Director of Insight and Impact at The Froebel Trust, welcomed the project. She said: “A growing body of evidence shows that regular contact with nature can support children’s development in many ways, helping to foster curiosity, creativity, emotional wellbeing and social connection.”

The most direct check on that sentence is a systematic review published on May 13, 2022 in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health by Avril Johnstone and colleagues at the University of Glasgow's MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit. It looked at nature-based early childhood education, meaning settings such as forest kindergartens, and at children's social, emotional and cognitive development.

The team searched nine databases up to August 2020 and screened 1,370 full-text articles. Thirty-six studies qualified: 26 quantitative, 9 qualitative and 1 mixed-methods, all with children aged 2 to 7.

The direction of the results is encouraging. The review found positive associations between nature-based preschool and self-regulation, social skills, social and emotional development and play interaction. Results on attention, attachment and initiative were inconsistent. Qualitative studies noted that these settings gave room for play, socialising and creativity.

The weight of that evidence is another matter. The review rates the certainty as very low. The combined sample across the 36 studies was 3,383 participants, and only three studies had more than 200. Of the 27 quantitative studies, only two were rated moderate in quality and the rest weak, mostly because of design, selection bias, blinding, confounders and attrition. Fifteen studies were cross-sectional, so they compare different children at one moment rather than following the same children over time. None was carried out in a low-income country, and where family income was reported it was generally moderate to high.

Babies fall outside it entirely, since the children in the review were always aged 2 to 7.

The review also concerns preschools that build nature into the day, which is a different thing from a Saturday in the park.

A second review points at the relational side of the Foundation's pairing. Jannette Prins and colleagues at Dutch universities published a qualitative synthesis in Frontiers in Psychology on November 10, 2022, pooling 28 qualitative studies with 998 children aged 2 to 8 in early education settings. They found three themes: the aspects of play quality linked to nature-based environments, the features of those environments that support play, and the part played by teacher-child interactions in the quality of nature play. A qualitative synthesis describes how play unfolds, so it measures no effect on development.

The authors say what they would need next: “high-quality experimental designs describing the dose and quality of nature are needed” to explore the pathways between nature-based preschool and development. A commissioned project that promises “practical, nature-based research”, in Catherine's words, is aimed at roughly that gap, though the announcement does not say whether it will use control groups.

Kemp's second sentence is the more careful one. Bringing together early childhood development and environmental science, she said, is an opportunity “to better understand how the benefits of a relational nature-based approach can be embedded in children’s everyday experiences from the very start of life”. The verb is better understand, which concedes that the understanding is still being built.

Where the work will happen

The Princess said her hope is that, through this research, “we can build supportive environments that help make nature more accessible” for families across the UK. Will Bax, Secretary and Keeper of the Records of The Duchy of Cornwall, said: “We look forward to supporting this work in Cornwall”.

For readers in the United Kingdom, the project is national in aim and Cornish in its first partner. For readers elsewhere, including in the United States, it is a case study in how a poll on belief and a thin evidence base can still justify asking a better question. The Foundation has said only that further details will be announced in due course.

Sources

• The Princess of Wales commissions new work exploring the role of nature in early childhood, The Royal Foundation, October 16, 2026
• Nature-Based Early Childhood Education and Children's Social, Emotional and Cognitive Development: A Mixed-Methods Systematic Review, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, Johnstone et al., May 13, 2022
• Nature play in early childhood education: A systematic review and meta ethnography of qualitative research, Frontiers in Psychology, Prins et al., November 10, 2022