If you were to tell me when I was a kid that when I became a parent it was going to be a struggle to get my kids to play outside, I would have looked at you as if you were nuts. I LOVED PLAYING OUTSIDE. There was this huge swath of undeveloped land mixed peach, apple and cherry orchards near my old house in New Jersey. This was our playground where our imagination was not limited to monkey bars and a couple of swings. As kids we would manage to grab a couple of our Dad’s tools to build things like club houses, bike ramps in secret places only known to us kids. I remember this one time my friends and I were jumping over water-filled ditches. All I had to do was to first jump onto the shopping cart that was in the middle, then jump again to make it to the other side. Of course I was the one who slipped and fell into the muddy ditch. There was also the time I was walking in a patch of woods near our house when all of a sudden what looked like a peacock jumped apparently out of nowhere in fear of my presence. Man, I must have looked like Stimie or Buckwheat running out of that patch of woods because it scared me like you would not believe (I couldn’t say “Jesus” fast enough I was running so fast). I later found out that it was a pheasant. Don’t get me started on the seemingly miles of bike trails we created with our bikes over the years. There was also a drainage lake back there where we would spend time skipping rocks in the water.
During the summer months we would be outside from sun up to sun down coming in only for lunch and the occasional snack. During the winter months, our little world turned into a mini winter wonderland where we would break out the sleds and slide down the two big hills that was located within the patch of woods near our community.
All of this took place not in the 1920′s in a farm community, but during the 1980′s in a community about 1/2 hour from the city of Philadelphia. My family was part of the growing migration of Blacks moving from the city to the mostly-White suburbs of South Jersey of that time. So many of my friends represented a mix bag of races where we all got along just fine.
Even though arcade games were increasingly becoming the latest form of entertainment for us kids, we still had to go out of our way to play these games. And besides, there was only so many quarters you could bum off of your parents. The outdoors was still our primary form of entertainment until video game systems like Atari, Colecovision and Intelivision began popping up in our homes. Hours that was spent blazing new trails in our mini wilderness outdoors was now being spent figuring out how to get to the next level in a game created by someone else’s imagination. As the years progressed, trails that were blazed by our Huffy bikes and Converse All-Star sneakers slowly became lost due to the weeds and other plants that grew over them because of inactivity. After high school, we went to college where we were taught how to live 9 hours of our day in a cubical with only a screensaver to remind us that the outdoors still exists.
Today, it is not uncommon for me to drive through a community and barely see a kid outside playing. Much of this can be attributed to things like time spent on the Internet or indoor gaming with systems like Playstation, Game Cube or Xbox. Just the other day I saw my new neighbor out with his teenage son preparing to go for a jog around the community. Later he told me that he gave his son two choices: jog with him or go in the garage and lift some weights. His son had been lounging around the house too much and finally this father had reached his limit. We then took a few moments to reminisce on the ‘good ol’ days’ when young girls would be outside playing double dutch and when us guys would play kickball where the fire hydrant was first base, the manhole was second, the tree was third and home plate was some obscure mark you found on the street.
As for our kids, I too have reached my limit with them. Now I just go ‘ol’ skool’ on them and just tell them to “Get out and find something to do!” Since taking this approach when dealing with my kids’ boredom, they along with some of the other neighborhood kids have come across a pile of odds and ends left behind by the builder in the empty lots in back of our house. They enthusiastically told me yesterday about a club house they were building with the scraps they found lying around complete with a pull-down shade, phone system and a door. Whatever they are building, they come home covered in dirt and scrapes here and there.
That’s okay. They are just being kids 
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