Some twenty years ago when reruns of Dawson's Creek were on the only handful of television channels your father would purchase and your older sister would burn Dave Mathews and Limp Bizkit onto CD’s she would title as “Dank Tunes," much time would be spent alone watching and listening to music; but, at some point there was a time in which you were so bored of the limited access to shows and music that you would have to seek out the company of your friends to fill the rest of your time with (that is if your parents didn’t kick you out of the house).

Ha! Suckers, what were your parents going to do anyway? Be bored at home? Dad doesn't even like Dawson's Creek and football isn't on. You got the better end of the deal now that you were with your friends out causing trouble, now surely out of the reach of parental control because there were no cell phones among teens.

Hours uncounted would be spent hiking up and down neighborhood sidewalks if you had them, or little “forests" behind some old lady’s house who didn’t seem to mind you causing a ruckus all day and night.

But you were being socialized, even if you didn’t know it. Some guy would bring around his sister and she had that early-2000’s overly-straightened hair - and you were in love, man. Sometimes the “other" group of kids would roll around and start hootin-and-hollerin your way and now suddenly you had to learn on the fly how to de-escalate a situation or play off what you could to make the situation manageable and safe.

Day after day, like that favorite CD on repeat, kids would sail headfirst into new situations with new and old faces and have to figure their way through and that was life – maybe yours, but definitely mine.

It was until I made friends with some people from overseas maybe nine or so years ago, and I asked them offhand what the strangest thing about America was.

“It’s creepy, in neighborhoods,” they stated, “There are no kids.”

That… didn’t sound right to me, but now in a car as I drove to wherever I was going I looked for the activity of children outside and felt… ashamed. Where did all the kids go? Had I been so distracted in my own life that I hadn’t noticed?

Not long after I became a summer-camp counselor, and was taken aback each week when many children admitted to me that that one week at camp was the most they had been outside in their life, and I was “lucky" to be able to play in trees – or I was "unlucky" and “awful" for being part of the experience that was taking them away from their favorite shows and videogames.

It only got worse when COVID hit, and in the spring through the fall of 2020 over 77% of public schools were online, and in 2021 50% were still closed (via the National Center for Education Statistics). Children were expected to stay inside and keep masks on nearly always if they were away from home.

I had a hard enough time learning how to socialize in middle school when boys were still slim-jims and girls were towering amazonians who were still learning what deodorant was that I couldn’t imagine going into that space with a year or more behind in my volume of interactions with my peers. That would be like going into middle school as a fourth-grader instead of fifth and you still have to wear masks and are unable to see how half of a person's face changes when they interact with you.

During my time as a camp counselor and even after it I mentored many young men who admitted that they didn’t know how to find a girlfriend, or even how to talk to a girl. Don't take my word for it though: the Pew Research Center’s website says dating has gotten harder in the last ten years, and 65% of women say they have experienced harassment on a date.

There are fewer marriages than even ten years ago, fewer fathers for which young men can emulate and moreover what a positive male influence looks like to young girls. On top of it all? Social media hooks children and adults alike into watching hours of inane footage – up voting chiseled athletes or watching footage of celebrities giving their opinion this way or that.

Scrolling for hours through social media feeds has earned a title, too:

“Doomscrolling." 

Social Media companies even use the same gambling-theory that casinos use to hook you and your children into deep seats of comfort. As the late and great Kahlil Gibran wrote:

“(Comfort) Makes mock of your sound senses, (and) murders the passion of the soul.”

The National Eye Institute writes that nearsightedness (myopia) is up 41.6% in Americans, up from 25% in 1971. They also show several studies that near-work (that happens close to your face) increases myopia in children, and some of those studies talk about how being outside is the only cure.

People are overworked and overstressed and likely not getting a healthy diet and it is easy to empathize. All the while children, youth, and young adults are suffering developmental delays that are both mental and physical, with myopia sometimes leading to uncorrectable blindness.

The question shouldn’t be “what sort of world are we leaving our children," but,

"What sort of children are we leaving in this world?” 

My man Kahlil Gibran says more in his ancient book, The Prophet: “(Children) Dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams."

Kids and youth should be shoveled outside, and now with cell phones they can contact their parents if they need them, unlike when we were kids and reruns of Roswell and Friends were all we had to watch.

They need the sun and the trees and the wild meetings with other children from houses down the street and they need to learn to socialize without cameras or helicopter parents watching their every move.

Austin Petak is an aspiring novelist and freelance journalist who loves seeking stories and the quiet passions of the soul. If you are interested in reaching out to me to cover a story, you may find him at austinpetak@gmail.com.

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