Paradise lost

Discuss modern childhood and modern children outside the home, in an open forum, and you'll find that here, too, disorder seems like the natural state. What's different is that in this domain, the word often comes with a capital "D". The one I learned about this week was Internet Addiction Disorder, when it was reported that a young English girl was having psychiatric treatment – or "digital detox" as it is known – to wean her off using her parents' iPad.

The word "wean" is appropriate: the girl is four years old, and has been a compulsive user of the tablet computer since she was three. She screams when it is taken away and the doctor treating her has said that if her parents hadn't taken this drastic step to curtail her use of it she would have required hospital care by the age of 11.

Better known, perhaps, is Nature Deficit Disorder (NDD), first proposed by American author Richard Louv in his 2005 book Last Child In The Woods. Louv's theory is that the less time children spend engaging with nature, the more their behavioural problems increase. One of the antidotes to NDD is what's known as "wilderness therapy" – taking youngsters who perhaps have those same behavioural problems and exposing them to, well, wilderness. The thinking is that if we're naturally overawed by the vastness of, say, a Highland mountain range, it's hard to be angry or aggressive. It puts problems into perspective, shows that there is something bigger – and, importantly, tougher – than the individual. If venturing into a wilderness area also means sleeping under the stars, lighting fires, handling knives and catching or finding your own food, so much the better. Anyone who has ever taken their kids on a camping trip will know how memorable they find it.

This idea of freeing and empowering children and connecting them with nature is one of the driving forces behind the increasingly-muscular Forest Schools movement, which takes young people into woodland areas and, as well as teaching them, lets them play unstructured games using whatever they find around them. But it is also one of the philosophical cornerstones of a new study of childhood by British author Jay Griffiths. The book is called Kith – used in its archaic sense to mean the place you know or are from – with the subtitle The Riddle Of The Childscape.

Having travelled widely while researching her previous book, Wild, Griffiths found a stark contrast between the experience of the children in the indigenous communities she studied and their counterparts in the West. Here, she argues, children are unhappy and disconnected from their surroundings, which is not what childhood is supposed to be about. Why this should be is the riddle she refers to. Something has gone very wrong with modern childhood, she thinks.

Broadly, Griffiths argues that children in the West lead atomised lives in which they are cut off from nature, deprived of opportunities for what anthropologists call "deep play" (the state of complete abandonment in a game), hedged-in by consumerism and kept indoors by the lure of computer games or by risk-averse parents infected by the safety-first culture.

More than that, their natural tribal leanings are discouraged and condemned as "gang culture" and their days, in Griffiths's words, are "diarised into wall-to-wall activities, scheduled from the moment they wake until the minute they sleep, every hour accounted for by parents whose actions are prompted by the fear that their child may fall behind in the rat-race which begins in the nursery". Sound familiar?

Of course it is easy to draw invidious comparisons between the lives of modern children and the childhood outlined in the work of Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth, whose verse makes an indelible link between children and nature. He famously wandered lonely as a cloud, and didn't own a watch or a Nintendo DS or have a violin lesson to hurry home for. Ditto the work of authors such as Mark Twain, whose own boyhood in Missouri gave him the setting and the characters for his two great novels, The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer and Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn. It is easy to point to them and say: this is what childhood once was but isn't any more.

Of course, not everyone can grow up on the banks of the Mississippi or have the Lakeland Fells for their playground – and even those who do might find their own experience of those places hard to tally with Twain's fiction and Wordsworth's misty-eyed verse. That was certainly the case for me, though more of that later.

So is it possible to have too idealised a notion of childhood? Possibly. It's a bit like telly and pop music – it was always better in the old days. But there is plenty of evidence to back up Griffiths's claims. For instance, groundbreaking research published by Unicef in 2007 found that in terms of general wellbeing, British children come bottom in a league table of the 21 most developed nations and that there is "a general climate of intolerance" towards them – the study found 70% of media stories about young people to be negative.

It's fair to say, then, that childhood probably has changed for the worse, for all sorts of reasons. Perhaps it is partly the advent of smartphones and computer games, unhelpful diversions that prevent unstructured, imaginative play. There is the pernicious influence of the internet and social media, which have brought pornography into the lives of 11-year-olds and allowed bullying to move to another level of unpleasantness. Or maybe it is the all-pervasive pressures of consumerism.

Meanwhile, the actual physical space available to those children who do lay down their consoles and venture outside has shrunk. In a 2009 study examining how children's games and playground chants have altered in the digital age, professor Andrew Burn of the University of London noted that: "In the changed geography of childhood, the street as a place for play has drastically diminished, while playgrounds tend to be more scrupulously overseen by teachers, learning assistants and playworkers." That is if the playgrounds are open at all – an infamous sign on a playground on the island of Raasay asks that it not be used on Sundays, while it was once the case in parts of mainland Scotland that the swings were chained up and put out of use on the Sabbath.

Then again, there are reasons why playing in streets is discouraged. Take a look at Bert Hardy's famous 1950s picture of two cheeky-faced imps doing just that in the Gorbals and what strikes you, as well as their general grubbiness, is the sheer lack of cars. It would be a very different picture today and the contrast is potentially deadly – 2010 figures show that road accidents account for about 35% of deaths among the under-16s. These rates rise and fall, but there are never going to be fewer cars on the roads.

Analyse the pedestrian fatalities by speed limit and you find that a 30mph limit – the one you find in many residential areas – is the second most lethal after the 60mph limit. Deaths drop to almost nothing, however, where the speed limit on a road is 20mph. In England, guidance from the Westminster government to local councils says the introduction of more 20mph speed limits should be considered a priority.

But a report published last month by pedestrian pressure group Living Streets claims that councils are being slow to act and thus stop hundreds of preventable deaths.

Living Streets' chief executive Tony Armstrong said: "It's a scandal. If this number of people had lost their lives travelling by train or bus there would be an outcry, an inquiry, and immediate action taken to improve safety measures." On that basis, parents could be forgiven for stopping their children from playing in the street.

There is a fightback of sorts, though. In Bristol recently, concerned mothers Alice Ferguson and Amy Rose came together to lobby their local council for a road closure one afternoon a month so their children could play games like hopscotch in the road, as previous generations did. The campaign is known as Playing Out and there are 30 participating streets in Bristol and beyond.

Ferguson, a mother of two pre-teens, said she was driven by the knowledge that her children simply didn't have the space to properly let off steam. "I worried about their lives being so indoors and sedentary. In the longer term, I wanted them to grow up with a sense of citizenship and belonging, able to interact with people of different ages and be part of a community."

Taking things further is New Yorker Lenore Skenazy, a champion of what is being called "slow parenting". She brought a media furore down on her head when she revealed in a newspaper column that she let her nine-year-old son travel alone on the subway. Some people accused her of child abuse and as a result she started a blog, Free Range Kids. It was later published in book form with the handy subtitle: "Giving our kids the freedom we had without going nuts with worry."

So how much freedom did we have as children and, as parents, how nuts are we to worry now? As I write this at home, my five-year-old daughter is about to leave for an hour-long organised activity of the "diarised" sort. After that she'll have a friend round here. The girl will be chaperoned from the neighbour's house three doors away, even though ours is a quiet street. There will be some princess-themed play and probably a fight or two. But I give it half an hour before they start agitating to watch TV.

My seven-year-old son, meanwhile, is heading the other way, also chaperoned, to a classmate's house. There, the pair will probably play a computer game, unless the sun comes out in which case they'll - well, who am I kidding? It'll be a computer game whatever the weather.

It's a sharp contrast to my own childhood. Admittedly mine was rural rather than urban – I grew up in Wordsworth's home town – but there was freedom to roam and explore and a palpable sense that the community of children in our village was a tribe with its own rules and rituals. It's a cliché, but it's true: in summer, aged not much older than my son is now, I would disappear after breakfast, come home when I was hungry, then disappear again. And so on until dusk and beyond.

Together with my friends I would cross fields, scour farm outbuildings, climb trees, swim in rivers, wade across streams, build dams and dens and hunt for birds' eggs. I never saw a playground – but I didn't need to. It wasn't quite like anything William Wordsworth or Mark Twain describe – there were always barbed wire fences to snag your jeans on and nobody ever saw a paddle steamer on the River Derwent – but it had much more in common with the childhoods Jay Griffiths would like to see than the dysfunctional ones her book is a broadside against.

Quite where that leaves me as a parent is hard to say. I'm caught between the impulse to throw my kids headlong into the wild – the sort of scary, character-forming subway ride they'll remember forever – and the worry that maybe the world's streets, parks, woods and wastelands really aren't as safe as they used to be.

Of course I want them to grow into adults who view their childhood as magical, free and unchaperoned – a wondrous place ruled by a glorious sense of disorder – but won't that sense of nostalgia which surely affects my childhood memories affect them equally, whatever the truth? I don't know – and it's a riddle that only time will solve.