Kids are more keen to sit indoors these days. Would you blame the parents, Val, or the other influences in modern society?
Thanks, that is actually a VERY good point, in fact the best one I've heard against my common rant.
I'd say to an extent both, as well as the changing face of society.
1) It's the parents that do less with their children ( I know MANY children whose parents never have time for them except for that 3-week Egypt holiday to make up for their guilty conscience). My father still took me and a few friends on trips to nearby towns and countrysides every odd weekend for a "day in the green", less and less parents do that now.
2) It's the TV and the computer that grow in influence. The first time I played with a computer was when I was 6, this was a semi-educational game together with my grandfather where you had two monkeys who had to shoot each others with bananas and you had to enter the angle and the power of the throw. At home we never had a computer until I was 9 years old, and I was the first (!) one in my class to have one ... less than ten years on, you have plenty of kids who spend a lot of time playing games. Likewise, the TV. The first children's channels only started up when I was about 7 or 8 years of age, and before that it was only in the mornings - where we were all at kindergarten or school, so we had little choice but to go play football on the playground instead.
3) The changing face of society: Less and less children are born, as a consequence that "oh the 10 of us, let's go play football on the lawn" is slowly disappearing. At the same time you have a growing number of immigrants who also have a higher number of children (in Germany, apparently people with a migrational background have 44% more children than the original population). Often enough, these groups tend to be secluded, and often the mothers don't know how to speak German/Dutch/English etc. and teach their children let's say, Turkish. So obviously, Turkish kids will as a consequence only hang out with Turkish kids, as they are going to be afraid to be left out of other groups when they cannot make themselves understood (and let's face it - kids are bluntly honest and they notice differences we try to negate when we are older - they'll pick on a kid whose got a funny accent) . And, as I have observed, the traditional activities there differ from hours, they are often more family-orientated than in Western society at the current time, you rarely see much of them around TBH.
So, really, a variety of factors. But it just is - it's changing.
