So sad. We baby boomers had such freedom as kids. I wandered through woods, swam in ponds and took home stray dogs that my mother would feed from the table. Maybe I idealize my childhood, but in some ways it was heaven.
Some have, some have not.
One of my neighbor kids is out all the time, with friends.
My other neighbor kid is out only as long as it takes to go from the house to the car or from the school bus to the house. The same is true of his mom. She is never, never out of doors. I suspect she frowns on the other kids because they may have offended her son somehow.
That said, I was an imaginative kid. I could just as easily get lost in another world cutting up old magazines and making collages inside as I could outdoors. So, I think a lot depends on the kid and HOW the kid is nurtured.
Our big tree in our back yard was a pirate ship, rocks were eggs we gathered on our farm, our picnic table was a car. We found scraps of wood and built boats that we floated in the lake. We chased sheep on our neighbor’s farm and our neighbor chased us. We walked to the movies on Saturday mornings. We played football, baseball, basketball, dodge ball. We played in mud puddles and had tomato fights. We had lots of boys in our neighborhood so I played with them and did what they did. We built forts in the woods and got up early on rubbish day to find treasures. We didn’t watch much TV.
I was watching The Sandlot with my 25 yr old daughter recently and she was saying how she wished she lived during that time. Kids today don’t really know how to be kids.