ANYONE looking at my photo albums would probably think my kids lived in the great outdoors, sleeping under trees and surviving on brambles, limpets and wild garlic. This, of course, is not true. Like most children today, the vast majority of their hours are spent between walls, quite a few of them on so-called devices, staring at screens.

But none of this features in my record of their lives. This is because, for me, the holidays and weekends, which are when I get out my camera, are when we get to escape this cooped-up life. They are the times when I try to deliver to my children booster jabs of the kind of childhood I had, of days of roaming fields, paddling in streams and climbing trees.

I often think my children’s existences are the reverse of my own childhood. Growing up on a farm, I used to roam the outdoors on school evenings and ordinary weekends; and it was to the city we went on holiday, to exotic Newcastle, Edinburgh or even London. I do the opposite with my own children. I take them to the wilds for the holidays, where we pretend for a while that they are farm-friendly, country kids.

Most surveys show that today's parents recognise that something has changed since their own childhoods, when – whether they grew up in town or country, they would routinely be thrown out their back door and let to play in the streets, parks or local patches of nature and wasteland.

And the period of childhood that has perhaps changed most dramatically, is the school summer holidays, which are just beginning, here in Scotland.

In my own youth, there was no time in which we experienced freedom more greatly than during that long sprawl of the summer break. Unstructured, untimetabled, it was there to play with or get bored in. It was a time for paddling in streams, making pacts, building dens, idling. But most of all, for being outdoors. Though in those days I don’t think the idea of the outdoors was even in our heads. We weren't playing outdoors – we were just playing.

It seems to me that these summer holidays remain an opportunity for us all. Of course, many of us are working, and there’s the struggle with childcare, but nevertheless we can try to give our children a little of what we had: a small taste of the freedom of the summer. We don’t have to go far to do this. We don’t even necessarily have to leave our home patch. In Edinburgh, where I live, within walking distance are parks, hills, beaches, streams. We don’t even need the whole day. The evenings are long and bright: perfect for games in the park and after hours family expeditions for working parents.

Fiona Danks runs a website called Going Wild and is co-author of outdoor play books with titles like the recently-published The Den Book and The Stick Book. She recalls the freedom of her own childhood: “I remember that feeling of the beginning of the holidays and you had that feeling that it was going to go on for ever. It seemed like that huge space. It was an exciting time because we had freedom to roam – whereas many children can’t have that opportunity now. Nowadays, for all sorts of reasons, parents are fearful to let their children go. And I guess in many places, especially cities, you can’t have that freedom. But nevertheless there are so many opportunities for getting your kids out.”

Often, she observers, families don’t know where to start – and this is where inspiring books like Danks’s enter the picture. Most of what she is suggesting is really about prompting kids to do their own thing. This can mean letting your child out to roam a little more locally. Or, if that's impossible or you’re uncomfortable with this, simply factoring a little more free play into an outdoor excursion. “If you’re going out for a walk and a picnic don’t just make it a route march," advises Danks. "Find somewhere nice to stop where the kids can play and have a bit of space of their own.”

The decline of time spent in the outdoors has been much researched and reported. In a single generation, since the 1970s, children’s "radius of activity" – the area around their home where they are allowed to roam unsupervised – is reckoned to have declined by almost 90 per cent. A Natural England report in 2009 found that fewer than a quarter of children regularly use their local "patch of nature", compared to over half of all adults when they were children. A survey published earlier this year, funded by Persil as part of their Dirt Is Good campaign, found that three-quarters of UK children spend less time outside than prison inmates.

However, in Scotland, in fact, we are not so disconnected from nature as other parts of the UK. An RSPB report found that children in Scotland have a significantly greater connection to nature than the average for the rest of the UK.

Author Richard Louv was first to coin the term "nature deficit disorder" to describe what he called “the human costs of alienation from nature” in his 2005 book Last Child In The Woods. Since then, a movement for change has clearly developed. It is manifested in forest schools, outdoor nurseries and playgroups, online organisations such as The Wild Network and in community gardens and nature clubs around Britain. You can find it in Edinburgh in the Leith Community Croft or The Children’s Wood at North Kelvin Meadow, at Glasgow's Woodland Outdoor Kindergartens or the Secret Garden nursery in Fife. At the same time a market in books and films catering for this renewed urge to reconnect is burgeoning – with countless publications providing ideas, inspiration and motivation. The include Richard Louv’s Vitamin N: The Essential Guide To A Nature-Rich Life; Project Wild Thing, a film by concerned dad David Bond; or the Meek family's 100 Family Adventures and 50 Evening Adventures.

Among the more inspiring campaigners for getting children outdoors are the Meeks of Nottinghamshire (parents Tim and Kerry and daughters Ella and Amy) – simply because they seem like a pretty average family who threw themselves at living that life, firstly by creating a series of 100 mini adventures for themselves, and later by going on the road to live in a caravan. Parents Tim and Kerry had both been teachers, neither of them with any real outdoors expertise, and they had started to feel, says Tim, “trapped in the rut of constantly trying to keep on top of work and all the house things”. They felt they were living for the weekends, so they decided they would make those weekends “worth living for” by making a list of adventures they would then go on.

The whole family was involved in this list. “We would just have a big sheet of whiteboard paper,” Meek recalls, “ and whenever we would be sat down eating and chatting we’d come up with ideas and put them on there.” Some of these ideas were quite small: a local evening walk with head torches on. Others were quirky– to spend the night in a tree tent. Most memorable for them, says Meek, was the night they spent sleeping on a beach.

“It was one of the simplest ideas," he notes. "All you needed was access to a beach and a bivvy bag. And we’d always wanted to do it.” But the plan didn’t go smoothly. A first attempt was aborted because they were caught in a “massive horizontal rainstorm”. They gave up on the second because when they got into their bivvy bags they realised that the entire beach was jumping with sand fleas. Finally when they did achieve their ambition, they all happened to wake up at 3am. “And what we saw was that it was the clearest night and that the Milky Way was just going right over the top of us," says Meek. "We kept seeing shooting stars and it wasn’t till we got back the next day that we realised that it was a meteor shower."

Meek’s biggest tip is to take your child as the starting point when deciding what activity to do. “You know your own children – what they like to do and what they don’t like to do. Ask them, but say it has to be outdoors, ideally a bit active.”

There is no single reason for why children are no longer playing so much outdoors – stranger danger, the rise of technology, risk aversion, squeamishness about dirt and mess – but most research suggests it is the parents and the culture that have created this shift, not the children. Parental fear is at the heart of it.

And it's hard, entirely, to dismiss this. Of course risk is an issue, and most parents struggle to have a relaxed attitude towards it. We may know a life well-lived is going to bring some injuries, or we may be able to point to our own scars from childhood bumps and bangs, but still few of us are capable of chilling when our child is dangling from a cliff face.

And how far do you take it? When are you being irresponsible? Or are you being irresponsible by not allowing your children to experience risk for themselves?

I was thinking about this earlier this year during a family holiday on Lismore Island, where we stayed in a cottage perched on a small rocky promontory next to a tiny beach, chosen partly because I wanted the children to explore in this patch of coast that feels like the end of the world.

Of course, there were incidents. A slip on the rocks left Louis, my elder son, with a gash in the face. Another stumble down a path left him with a bloodied knee. Another random cut happened in a car park, though it was hard to work out why. By the end of the trip he had labelled Lismore “the island of accidents”.

Like most parents, I had a moment of self-recrimination. It was me that had let him climb on the slippery rocks – possibly my husband would not have done so. But, on the other hand, wouldn’t it be a little irresponsible not to let my children learn to assess their own risk and abilities themselves? “Children need accidents," writes the visionary nature writer Jay Griffiths in her book, Kith: The Riddle Of The Childscape, "little ones, ideally, accidents the right size, through which they learn to avoid bigger accidents later." Of course, even a right-sized accident, all too often, seems to glow with the possibility of a wrong-sized one.

At the same time, going outdoors shouldn't be seen purely as a lesson in risk, or indeed as a character-building exercise. When we were children, we didn’t play outside because it was “good for us”. Our parents weren’t guided by research extolling the benefits or exposure to nature. Back then, no-one was telling us or our parents how to do it. There were no books telling us how to build dens; no courses telling us how to practise bushcraft; no experts urging us to pick brambles.

That we need those guidebooks now, compounds the sense of loss. Do we really require experts to teach us this? It seems we may well do. As Fiona Danks says: “Somebody said to me once, 'The sad thing about your books is that they need to be written and that people need to buy them. Wasn’t it instinctive when we were young that you just went outside and you played and used to love imaginary games and discovering the natural world?'”

Danks’s best selling book is The Stick Book. “It is,” she says, “lots of thing to go out and do with a stick. A lot of it is obvious. You may think, don’t all kids do this? No, they don’t.”

In Kith, Jay Griffiths asks why, as statistics often suggest, children are so unhappy and answers the question by saying it is because they are disconnected from nature. “Born to burrow,” writes Jay Griffiths, “and nest in nature, children are now exiled from it. They are enclosed indoors, caged and shut out of the green and vivid world, in ways unthinkable a generation ago.”

We have to do our best to resist this enclosure – and we can start with these summer holidays. We may not be able to give our children the childhoods we had. But we can give them a glimpse. We can plant a seed. And from that, perhaps, something will grow.

The Den Book by Jo Schofield and Fiona Danks is published by Frances Lincoln, £12.99

50 Evening Adventures: After School, After Work, Out Of Doors by the Meek family is published by Frances Lincoln

For more outdoors inspiration visit goingwild.net or dotrythisathome.net or thewildnetwork.com