Teddy Bear Hunt? Neighbors help entertain children during the coronavirus pandemic

The coronavirus pandemic has provided a wholesome distraction for children across the world: Teddy Bear Hunts.

Stuffed animals have appeared in windows of neighborhood homes, offering kids an outdoor activity while social distancing, according to media reports. Children walk or drive around with their parents, hunt for the teddy bears and keep track of how many they find.

“It’s time to give the kids something fun to do,” Holly Hollman, city spokeswoman for Athens, Alabama, told WAFF. “You know, they’re out of school, they’re having to learn at home, they’re not able to go to playgrounds and get with their friends like they’re used to. So this is something fun that we can do to help entertain them.”

The activity is based on the 1989 children’s book “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt,” Time reported.

The scavenger hunt has proven to be popular and has picked up steam through social media. Christina Lorenz told The Denver Post she has seen friends post about it in Idaho and Texas.

“My oldest daughter doesn’t like to go on walks,” Lorenz told The Denver Post. “This makes it a little bit more exciting.”

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is among the people throughout the world who has put bears in windows of her home, the New Zealand Herald reported.

One woman told The Waterloo Cedar Falls Courier in Iowa that their children spotted more than 250 bears in a hunt throughout their community.

The activity has provided a “sense of community” throughout the pandemic, a South Carolina father told Time.

“It extends our family symbolically in a way that we otherwise might not be able to,” Rhodes Bailey told Time. “When you go by a bear house, it’s almost like a positive love code that people are sending. You feel like they’re immediately friends.”

Allison Angell, of Maine, told WMTW the hunt provided a way to tune out the coronavirus news.

“For about an hour we didn’t think about anything else that was happening in the world,” she told WMTW. “It was just about the bears. The kids sat in the backseat. My daughter kept a tally. We kept looking, and it was only that, and I had completely forgotten what was going on until we pulled back into the yard.”

This story was originally published March 31, 2020 at 10:02 AM with the headline "Teddy Bear Hunt? Neighbors help entertain children during the coronavirus pandemic."