Attention little kids: Get out of the house

Wednesday, July 19, 2006

‘‘Get out of the house.”

That’s me talking to my 9-year-old son. No, Alec is not packing his bags and setting off to get a job and a place of his own. I firmly believe he should get through fourth grade first.

I just want him and his friend Michael to get off their rumps, get into the back yard and play.

After all, the sun is out for the first time in what seems like a week. Yet here on a mild summer afternoon sit these two healthy boys playing baseball — on PlayStation.

When I urge them to go outside, you’d think I was offering them a bowl of worms. Alec moans, ‘‘Whyyyy?” Michael, slumped in a bean bag chair, announces that he’s tired.

Parents are waging this battle all over the country, as children increasingly plop down in front of TV and computer screens rather than run around outside. ‘‘Childhood pastimes are increasingly moving indoors,” declared a headline in USA Today last summer.

I give the boys 10 minutes to get into the back yard and do something.

It’s a huge yard, stocked with a virtual circus of entertainment: a swing set big enough to have its own address, a basketball net, a sandbox, a soccer ball and net, a big plastic box full of baseball equipment, a football, rackets, birdies and balls, horseshoes and an arsenal of water pistols.

The boys had swim practice a few hours ago and claim to be pooped. OK, let me show my sympathy: Get out of the house anyway. As children, my friends and I spent countless hours sitting on stoops, digging in sandboxes and lying on the grass, ruminating about everything from the shapes of the clouds to the great things we would accomplish when we grew up.

Unfortunately, one of the things our generation has accomplished is inventing gadgets to lure our children in from gazing at the clouds. Our television gets about 5,000 cable channels, including several networks aimed just at children. Add the computer and PlayStation games, and my house is like an arcade. Maybe instead of pushing the boys outside, I should sell them tokens.

I don’t blame the kids; adults buy the toys and are succumbing to the same temptations. This month, two researchers reported that the increasing desire of adults to stay home with their TVs, DVD players, computers and video games is the main reason for a 25 percent decline in visits to national parks in recent years. The Washington Post says they call the phenomenon ‘‘videophilia,” which sounds like an obsession with renting movies that you have to hide from the children. Actually, it refers to ‘‘the new human tendency to focus on sedentary activities involving electronic media.”

When I see my son and his friends succumb to the video habit, I worry that I’m helping to create a race of smart wimps who can’t survive outside their climate-controlled environments. When my friends and I played outside on summer days, griping about the heat was for old folks. As Jimmy and I played football on his front lawn on August afternoons, his grandmother would bellow from the house, ‘‘You’re gonna get heat stroke!”

We didn’t know what heat stroke was, but it sounded like a good reason for an old lady to stay inside and leave us alone.

When kids play sports now, it’s usually in a league. Many of them have little experience walking outside and entertaining themselves with made-up games and spontaneous bike rides.

Besides, most of us don’t let our kids ride their bikes off the block. As a child, my summer routine was to walk out the back door, hop on my bike and bounce among friends’ houses until dinner. Today, our kids sit around until we escort them to another scheduled round of play. No wonder surveys find that kids are fishing, swimming and riding bikes less than they used to, and watching TV and playing video games more.

When Alec asks ‘‘whyyyy” he has to go play outside, I say nice days were created just for that. You get fresh air. You get exercise. You make up games and fight over the rules.

I don’t mention that you also create unexpected memories. Like the time my shoelace got snagged in my bicycle chain and I flipped over the handlebars onto the road. Or the time the saddle came loose on my neighbor’s horse and I ended up riding sideways as Red sprinted along a chain link fence. Or the time my friend pegged me in the head with a rock.

None of these fun things happen to the boys as they play baseball in the yard. They enjoy themselves anyway, but come in after a half hour. I count that as a small victory over the electronic gaming industry, although I suspect no one at Sony is sweating.

Patrick Boyle is editor of Youth Today, the national newspaper on youth work. He can be reached at pboyle@youthtoday.org.