And even when you can encourage your child (or yourself -- adults also still need to have well-rounded experiences in the physical world, and outside their comfort zones) to go do something off the screen everyone else is still stuck on it. That's the issue I've been running into lately. Try to go do something, meet new people, etc. and a lot of them are just on their phones, if they're there at all.

It's true. The big reason that kids don't go out and play anymore is that there are no kids outside playing anymore. I live in a neighbourhood where I'm only a few blocks from 2 elementary schools and I never see any kids out playing.

A product of helicopter parenting in many respects. New parents don't tend to like the idea of letting their kids running around the neighborhood. The way those well off enough like to reconcile this with balanced lifestyle is overschedule activities for their kids. They get ze dezignated social time at hockey, soccer, karate every other night. Busy-ing a kid's life has its own pitfalls.

Treating it as an intentional choice is ignoring all the cases of "parent gets investigated or arrested for allowing child outside".

https://people.com/parents/mom-investigated-dcfs-letting-dau...

https://www.parenting.com/blogs/show-and-tell/hayley-parenti...

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/07/arreste...

That's "inside-out" helicopter parenting, where someone else is being the helicopter, not the parent. Kudos to Utah and their "free-range parenting" laws: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/29/well/family/utah-passes-f...

Local business owner was telling me that police showed up at her business with her 9 year old because the 9 year old was "out on her own". He was walking from the local business to their house, about ... 8 blocks from the business. It's a smallish town (40,000 population, but in this 'old town district', maybe 2-3000?). Police brought the kid back to the business and chastised the business owner, intimating that letting her kid walk home unattended was in violation of some law. She asked for the specific law, which pissed off the officer to no end (because there isn't one here).

What's bizarre is that the cop was probably allowed to do the same as a child.

Yeah! Certainly in my day (which wasn't that long ago!) we ... walked everywhere (or rode a bike) as a kid.

There is safety in numbers; parents will let their kids go out to play when there are other kids around. And depending on where you go in the country, you'll see groups of kids playing or you won't. But it's self feeding, as fewer kids play outside, fewer parents let their kids play outside. My kid has no reason to go outside if there is nobody out there.

True enough, I imagine it would help for kids in the neighborhood to be introduced to each other first.

> we want our children have well rounded experiences

There are some categories, like sport, where even if a kind doesn't have any interest for it, as a parent we have to force them to do a healthy minimum.

But otherwise I tend to think it's not that important to be 'well rounded' as long as the kid have tried a bunch of things. I guess if they at least had a throw at it and decided they don't like it, they know how it was and what they're missing.

From there it seems more efficient to grow their strengths and push the subjects they actually like doing. (and finding out what they like is in itself a process of trying out a variety of things to see what sticks, so both broadening their knowledge of what exists in the world and growing their strengths should go together)