Is there any feeling on earth quite like that of a child on the first day of the summer holidays? The giddying sense of freedom and potential, after hours spent gazing longingly at browning grass and cloudless skies through classroom windows. At the beginning of the summer holidays, your gauzy days stretch out before you like chewing gum, waiting to be filled with adventure. If you were anything like me, most of them will have been spent outside; your life a procession of doing words: running, climbing, building (and wrecking), swimming, playing and paddling.
Related: Nearly one in four British children overweight or obese, claims study
The doing words of today’s children are somewhat different. There’s gaming, and sitting, and eating. Indeed, a report has found that children’s lazy summer holidays are responsible for wiping out children’s fitness levels. The study of 400 children in 14 schools found that fitness levels improved over the course of the academic year, only to be undone by the long summer holidays spent hunched over gadgets. In terms of physical activity, the bare minimum for children should be 60 minutes a day. This report indicates that children are failing to achieve even that.
Much of this can be blamed on the technology that was simply unavailable before now. As a society, we specialise in timewasting; another report released today found that we are now spending 25 hours a week on the internet, and most of that will be indoors. Many children I meet seem to have their time rigidly planned out in activity blocks – school, after-school activities, homework, bed – so slumping in front of a screen must seem like cosy respite in comparison. But you wonder if they’ll ever know the exquisite boredom of an empty summer day, where you’re booted out in the morning after your friends come to call, to return only at dusk when it’s time for tea?
While acknowledging the wonder of my summer holidays, I’m mindful of indulging in that blinkered editing that we are so prone to when reminiscing about our childhoods. The idealisation of Britain’s supposed golden days – which we are told were beacons of comfort, safety and liberty – has been an unpleasant undercurrent throughout the referendum debate and can be most adequately summed up in the peculiar form what I call “Daily Mail slum nostalgia”, wherein childhood suffering, whether through poverty, safeguarding failures or poor housing, is conveniently ignored.
A survey earlier this year found that three-quarters of children spend less time outside than US prison inmates
But we all indulge in the temptation to glorify bygone childhoods from time to time. I would read Enid Blyton’s Famous Five stories and marvel that these kids were allowed to ride bicycles freely across the whole of England, despite constantly bumping into dodgy blokes with criminal intentions. I was only allowed out from morning until twilight. Still, I realise how privileged that lifestyle was and, when I look back, it does have to be said that very few of my classmates were fat.
Britain’s childhood obesity epidemic renders children’s lazy summer holidays all the more concerning. 9.1% of children in year 6 (aged 10 to 11) are obese and a further 14.2% are overweight. Of children in reception (aged four to five), 9.1% are obese and another 12.8% are overweight. This means a third of 10- to 11-year-olds and over a fifth of four- to five-year-olds are overweight or obese, according to Public Health England. And this isn’t just about physical health; it’s estimated that in every school classroom in the UK, at least three children are suffering from a mental health issue. There’s no doubt that less time spent outdoors will likely compound this crisis.
A survey earlier this year found that three-quarters of children spend less time outside than US prison inmates. The National Trust has long spoken of “nature deficit disorder” as screen time increases and the so-called “radius of activity” shrinks (the area around a child’s home where they are allowed to roam unsupervised has shrunk by over 90% since 1970). There is a mental health epidemic in adults that stems partly from the health system’s failure to adequately deal with issues in childhood. We are constantly being hawked mindfulness apps and techniques as a way of supposedly dealing with this.
Why? Because many of us have forgotten how to exist in the moment, as this sad news about school breaks demonstrates. There is no one more mindful than a child on their summer holidays, when the return to school is a distant concept. In the moment, all that matters is the rock pool you’re in, the squidge of sand between your toes, the crumble of bark beneath your fingernails, the echoing bounce of the ball on tarmac or the brittle crackle of the bracken you’re tunnelling in. Are you ever more connected with your senses that when you are in nature? Even if that nature is a patch of grass at the end of your street, in your imagination it can become a jungle.
I’m not saying that kicking children out of the house each summer will solve a public health crisis that is the result of a complex combination of factors, or that my childhood was flawless. But I can say that I spent much of it doing what our bodies have evolved to do: moving. And I’m all the better for it.
It’s the summer holidays – and children need time outside | Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett
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