It’s important for our children to explore the outside

I remember Sunday nights consisting of having a bath and hair washed ready for school on Monday morning, having a boiled egg sandwich for my tea, watching

Bullseye on TV with my parents and actually having a conversation during the breaks. As a child I would play outside and talk to snails who lived in holes in the

wall, my friends would call for me and we would go outside and be back home ready for tea time at the time my parents told me to be back home for and if it was just one minute later, then I would be grounded.

I am now a mother to a 13 year old, who I assume like most teenagers are locked in her bedroom with her mobile phone glued to her hand, her music blaring so loudly it sounds as if the ceiling is going to collapse through sheer loudness of it and an Xbox

game on the TV that she’s not really playing but it’s there in the background. No friends knock at the door to see if she’s going out, even though we live yards from a park with so much grass you could have your own lesson of Cross Country twice over. No one calls for her to go out playing in the street – or even to go and talk to snails that they might see.

Now I can’t completely blame technology for this but society really has changed and for our generation and the next generation of children, it makes me sad that they don’t have the freedom and safety that I had as a child growing up.

We only have to turn on our television or radio to hear of another life taken by knife crime which in turn makes us want to wrap our own children up in cotton wool but we know the reality is, we can’t do that but it doesn’t stop us feeling scared when our children do go out.

It’s important for our children to experience and explore the outside, children need to socialise, make friends and interact. But nostalgia may soon be all we have because of fears over traffic and knife crime. A child who learns that the world is theirs to explore, he argues, is more likely to grow into a confident adult, but isn’t that something that is being taken away from our children?

There’s a constant change in our children’s freedom, to some adults a group of young people can seem intimidating and to parents whose children do go out there’s a constant worry of, I hope they are okay.

What is happening to our children’s skills that aren’t being developed through role play and freedom? Are we of a generation where our children aren’t growing into a confident adult because the safest method is for them to be in their bedroom with only technology as a friend?