Children should get out more — even if it’s for hide and seek in the park

We live in an urban world. It’s a statistical fact. The great outdoors for most of us is a thing of the past — a place, like elderly relatives, to be visited infrequently and preferably with gloves. Metro world, by contrast, is safe, insulated, inviting. No getting wet in the rain, no patchy wifi, no mud on our new Nikes.

Little wonder that our education system has gone the same way: safe, sedentary, sterile. Patrick Barkham thinks there might be a better way. Give kids more space, he pleads. Free them up from rules and tests. Climbing trees, prodding roadkill, collecting grubs: hell yes, if they want to, why not?

The statistics (that boring, schooly word again) suggest he might be on to something. One in eight British youngsters can’t identify an oak leaf. Important? Perhaps not; but the rise in child obesity, anxiety and just plain unhappiness is harder to overlook. In a world in which children’s terrain has been ‘radically annexed’ and play ‘institutionalised’, is it time to join the dots?

Wild Child, fortunately, is no lefty harangue. Yes, Barkham is a white, middle-class, Norfolk-residing Guardianista (literally; he’s on the payroll) who sends his children to a forest school equivalent. But he is sensitive to this fact and, better still, knows that nature-bashing will win him few converts (and fewer readers). Wisely, he has opted to write a ‘show-not-tell’ style of book — albeit one that explicitly sets out to relate an ‘empowering and hopeful story’ about the benefits of engaging with the outdoors.

The basic structure is provided by his year as a regular volunteer at Dandelion, a nature-based nursery school near his home.