Recently, my younger son, Matthew, who is 10, looked at me across a restaurant table and said quite seriously, "Dad, how come it was more fun when you were a kid?"

I asked him what he meant.

"Well, you're always talking about your woods and treehouses and how you used to ride that horse down near the swamp."

At first, I thought he was irritated with me. I had been telling him what it was like to use string and pieces of liver to catch crawdads in a creek. Perhaps he felt that I was romanticizing my childhood at the expense of appreciating his own. But my son was serious. He felt that he had missed out on something important. The kind of freedom and access to nature that so many of us enjoyed when we were children seems a quaint artifact in an era of kid pagers, mall rats, and Nintendo bass fishing games.

As a boy, I was not aware that my woods were ecologically connected with any other forests; nobody talked about acid rain or holes in the ozone or global warming. But I knew my woods and my fields, I knew every bend in the creek and dip in the beaten dirt paths. I wandered here even in my dreams.

During the past 15 or 20 years, however, this relationship has reversed. Today, kids express extraordinary awareness of global threats to the environment. But at the same time, their intimacy with nature is fading.

The change is startling: In past decades, summer camp was a place where you camped out and hiked in the woods, learned about plants and animals, or told spooky stories about ghosts or mountain lions. Today, it seems no summer camp is complete without computers. In the early '80s, an advertisement began to appear in national magazines, which showed a little boy silhouetted in front of a cabin window, tapping at a computer terminal. Beyond the glass, trees could be seen, and a sailboat moved lazily across a pond. In Southern California, Girl Scouts can attend a "High Tech-Computer Whiz" camp—with $50,000 worth of terminals and software.

Why the apparent separation of children from nature?

One reason is that parents are rightly worried about what could happen to their children in the canyons or woods or fields. But we're probably too worried. Despite the occasional horrific stories about strangers who snatch, molest, or murder a child, the actual rate of such offenses is not nearly as high as advertised. Another reason is the way suburban sprawl has gradually reduced the natural habitat, for human children and other animals.

A third reason is demographic. Baby boomers - Americans born after World War II, from the '50s to the '60s - may be the last generation to share an intimate, familial attachment to the land and water. Many of us knew forest or farmland at the suburban rim. And often we had grandparents or other older relatives who farmed. (In 1993, the U.S. Bureau of the Census released its annual report on the U.S. farm population—accompanied by announcement that the farm population had become so small, it would be the last report of its kind.)

Parents and children seem troubled by this transformation, but not at all sure what to do about it. To research "Childhoods' Future" (Anchor), a book about childhood in America, I interviewed nearly 3,000 children and parents in classrooms and living rooms across the country. The topic came up often.

"It's all this watching," said one young mother. "We've become a more sedentary society as a whole. I even see ads for toys, VCRs, videos all these machines that kids sit there and watch. When I was a kid growing up in Detroit, we were always outdoors. The kids who were indoors were the odd ones. We didn't have any wide-open spaces but we were outdoors on the streets, in the vacant lots, playing baseball, hopscotch."

"Something else was different: our parents were outdoors," added a father, who is a physician. "I'm not saying they were active like yuppies today, as far as joining health clubs and things of that sort, but they were out of the house, out on the porch, talking to neighbors."

It's not easy to encourage children to form an enduring link with the outdoors. "When our kids were in third or fourth grade we had a little field behind us," a woman said. "The kids were complaining about being bored. I said, 'Okay, I want you to go out to that field and spend two hours. Find something to do there. Just trust me, just one time try it.' They begrudgingly went out to the field. And they didn't come back in two hours—they came back much later. I asked them why. They said, 'It was so much fun! We never dreamed we could have so much fun!' They climbed trees, they watched bugs, they chased each other, and they played games like we used to do when we were young. So the next day I said, 'Hey, you guys are bored, go to the field.' And they answered, 'No, we've already done that once.'"

What children say
"I like to play indoors better 'cause that's where all the electrical outlets are," said a gifted fourth-grader in San Diego.

"I don't really have much time to play," said a fourth grade boy. "My mom makes me practice piano for about an hour every day, and then I have my homework, and that's about an hour's worth, and then I've got soccer practice, and that's from 5:30 to 7:00. On weekends we usually have soccer games, and I have to practice piano and then I have to do yard work, and then I have the chores, and then I'm free to play—which is only about two hours, three hours something like that."

The separation of children and nature has profound implications.

Nature comes in many forms: a new calf steaming, a pet that lives and dies, woods with beaten paths and stinging thistles. It offers children a world separate from parents—a kind of greater father and mother.

One of my stops was at my own elementary school, Southwood Elementary School in Raytown, Missouri, near Kansas City. The same swings (or so it seemed) still creaked above the hot asphalt, the same pint-sized wooden chairs, carved and deeply initialed with black and blue and red ink, sat waiting in crooked rows. As the teachers herded the children in from several classrooms, second through fifth grade, I unpacked my tape recorder and glanced at the ridge of blue-green elms moving slowly in the spring breeze. How often I had dreamed of those trees....

Raytown, undesired by developers, still exists on the edge of farmland and woods. These children often still play outdoors. I asked the kids: When you play in the woods, what do you think about, who do you pretend to be?

"I'm some famous mad scientist out looking for some frogs or something to stick in a new chemical to make the world explode or something."

"I feel like I'm a scientist and I'm looking for cures for diseases. And like I'm finding some secret passages."

"What I imagine whenever I go in the woods and go look for stuff is I'm one of the world's great explorers and I'm exploring something else. I'm trying to look for something."

"I pretend I'm one of those National Geographic explorers and I catch all these animals. One time I took a frog home and my mom got pretty mad at that cause she doesn't like frogs." Some children imagined the cosmos, and other mysteries. "Whenever I'm out in the woods I like to think about things like Star Trek and space and how it can go on and on forever and things like the Loch Ness monster and Bigfoot and if they really are true."

I asked if anybody pretended to be a cowboy, an Indian, or a soldier, in the woods. But among these modern children, only one boy said he did. For most, fantasies were more likely to involve technology, space, and family issues.

"When I'm in the woods, I play like it's just a home," said a girl. "I just go back to the woods and like with all the trees gathered together, and some of the trees split, it sort of looks like a home." A boy said: "I just pretend I'm my grandpa. I have a little pair of overalls down at my grandfather's. I put those on and I do the exact same work as he does and it makes me feel like I'm a farmer."

And one remarkable girl, a fifth grader, wearing a plain print dress and an intensely serious expression, told me she wanted to be a poet when she grows up. "When I'm in the woods," she said, "I feel like I'm in my mother's shoes."

For some children, nature serves as a slate upon which to draw the fantasies suggested by the culture. Given a chance, children will bring this outside world to the woods, fields, and creeks, where they can examine it in peace. At a deeper level, nature gives children itself, for its own sake, not as a reflection of our culture. Access to nature also gives children a sense of privacy.

"It's so peaceful out there and the air smells so good," said the little poet. "For me it's completely different there. It's like you're free when you go out there, it's your own time. Sometimes I go there when I'm mad and then just with the peacefulness I'm better. I can walk back home and be happy and my mom doesn't even know why."

I wondered: How do your parents feel about you going out to the woods?

Several of the kids said their parents didn't want them going out to the woods because of fear of strangers. "They don't feel real safe if I'm going real deep in that woods. I just can't go too far," said a boy. "My parents are always worrying about me. I don't know why. I'll just go and usually I don't tell 'em where I'm going so that makes 'em mad. I'll sit behind the tree or something, or lay in the field with all the rabbits."

Finally, I asked if any of them if they had a favorite woods or field.

The little poet, face flushed, spoke urgently: "I had a place. There was a big waterfall and a creek on one side. I'd dug a big hole and sometimes I'd take a tent back there or a blanket and just lay down in the hole and just look up at the trees andtr the sky and sometimes I'd fall asleep back in there. I just felt free, it was like my place, I could do what I wanted, and nobody could stop me. I used to go down almost every day and then they just cut the woods down. It was like they cut down part of me."

Part II of this piece, to be published next week, will look at ways that we can help bring children back to nature.