Okay, so maybe this isn’t the time of year to be pondering this question. (I mean, duh–it’s been below freezing for days on end here, coupled with bitter winds and black ice under the snow. Kids, aren’t you just dying to go out and play?)

But it’s something that’s been on my mind lately: Do kids still play outside? Run around and explore the neighborhood? If not, why not?

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post on the Chicago Moms Blog about this very issue. And over at Bring the Family, Toni’s been talking about how to get kids out in nature in an increasingly indoors-oriented world. Here is an excerpt of a comment I posted over there in response to one of her posts:

The thing I kept wondering last summer was: WHERE ARE ALL THE KIDS? I live on a block with probably 150 residences on it. I KNOW there are tons of kids here. So where are they? In their backyards, I guess (edited to add: or, their bedrooms). We’d find them at the park, but to me going to the park for an hour with your parents is not the same as the kind of adventurous, lazy, meandering, all-day play I experienced as a kid. I think kids are increasingly drawn indoors by the screens, AND parents are busier so often kids aren’t at home but are in some kind of structured activity or child care or after-school program, and when they ARE home, parents are too nervous/paranoid to let kids have the kind of freedom that you need to be able to have those “dawn-to-dusk” outdoor days. Here’s one great resource that talks about a lot of these issues: Playborhood.

The thing is, I think kids learn so much from those first tastes of freedom, not to even mention the necessity of physical activity and being out in nature. I want for my kids a community full of other kids running from house to house, from yard to yard, exploring, digging, and just…playing. My fear is that it just doesn’t exist anymore.

What do you think? What’s keeping kids indoors, and how do we get them back outside?