Forum: Families need to connect to a quality of life in work and play

A lot of people are going places all the time for both professional and personal reasons.

Tourism dollars spent globally represent about 10 percent of the world's economy; the U.S. ranks No. 1 in tourism visitors while China is now No. 2. As a continent, however, Europe is the No. 1 most visited.

I got to thinking several weeks ago about the workplace, tourism and outdoors life as I visited Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks, popular destinations among the 401 properties of the National Park Service, which is marking its 100th anniversary this year. The Park Service estimates more than 275 million visitors, many from foreign lands, will be guests in 2016.

While traveling and observing others, I started to connect some dots. The majority of adults and nearly all young people I saw are skilled at personal technology that allows 24-hour media access.

The travelers I encountered did not really talk so much to one another but mostly sat alone engaging iPhones, and interacting with their own personal cyber world.

The amount of time people spend with entertainment media continues to rise ­dramatically. Research shows that 8- to 18-year-old students devote an average of more than 70 hours a week engaged in social media. The ever changing mobile devices such as smartphones, iPods and others involved in texting, gaming, music and social networking have resulted in nearly 90 percent of young people owning and using them with little or no parental supervision, even for the very young.

A Kaiser Family Foundation report put it this way, "When children are spending so much time doing anything, we need to understand how it's affecting them — for good and bad."

Researchers at the University of Illinois have reported that children as young as 5 showed a significant reduction in the symptoms of Attention-Deficit Disorder when they engaged with nature.

Additionally, dramatic increases in childhood obesity, now affecting 1 in 4 very young children, is evidence to health professionals of the need for outdoors activity that includes rigorous ­physical activity.

But kids and computers do have an upside. The nonprofit child advocacy group Common Sense Media reports that 1 in 5 teenagers surveyed said social media makes them feel more confident, compared with 4 percent who said it makes them feel less so. Fifty two percent of teens surveyed said social media has made their lives better vs. just 4 percent who said it has negatively affected them.

In traveling, I wondered if today's young people — whose love of animals and outdoor play at very young ages is almost always evident — are losing interest in exploring the natural treasures to the vast reach of the electronic ones?

I agree with former President Jimmy Carter who wrote that "it is good to realize that if we can teach our children to honor nature's gifts, the joys and beauties of the outdoors will be here forever."

Today, of course, with virtual offices and innovations in global media of all kinds, relocation decisions of businesses have more options to consider.

Generally speaking, the CEOs and boards I advised were looking to relocate or expand with a focus on 1) where it made the most business sense and 2) where there was ample and available capital, a suitable workforce and a high-level life quality options.

In addition to outdoors opportunities, the quality of life issues that were most often mentioned included availability of good housing, schools, health care and wellness, public safety and engaged, active civic involvement. Minnesota, by the way, often ranked highly as a place to live and work based on that criteria.

While the cost of doing business in a new location is obviously important, employees and their quality of life often ranked even higher.

So, exactly where do workers — about 13 percent in the United States alone relocate every year — and their families prefer to live?

By Mercer's own sophisticated measurements, the top four places to live and work in the world are Vienna, Austria; Zurich, Switzerland; Auckland, New Zealand, and Munich, Germany.

Further down the list, San Francisco (28) ranks highest in the United States, followed by Boston (34), Honolulu (35), Chicago (43), and New York City (44). The Twin Cities region ranks 50th globally in the most recent information available.