On Childhood, Nature, and Freedom

In my last post, I reflected on how, in recent decades, a quiet but profound shift has taken place: childhood has moved indoors. Streets that once echoed with play are quieter now; bedrooms glow instead with the soft, constant light of screens. This isn’t just nostalgia. Across multiple studies, researchers describe the same pattern—children spending less time outdoors and more time engaged with digital media, a change that has accelerated over the past few decades (Gray, 2011; Tremblay et al., 2015).

I have also written about another cultural shift: the increasing tendency to teach children to conceal their bodies and to associate nudity with risk or impropriety. At first glance, these may appear to be separate developments. But taken together, they point toward something deeper—a transformation in how children experience both their environment and themselves.

What does this actually mean for how children grow up—and what, if anything, should we do about it?

Eero Järnefeldt, "Leikkiviä Lapsia," 1895. Public Domain.

It is tempting to treat this as a matter of discipline. Limit screen time. Encourage outdoor play. Set boundaries and stick to them. And to some extent, that is correct. Yet the research points to something more structural. Screens are no longer just one activity among many; they have become the default environment. Outdoor play, once the background condition of childhood, now has to be arranged, supervised, and sometimes negotiated.

In other words, the problem is not simply that children are choosing screens. It is that the world around them increasingly makes that choice inevitable.

When researchers describe the decline of outdoor play, they often measure it in hours. But what has been lost is not just time—it is a whole mode of experience. Unstructured outdoor play once meant moving freely, engaging the senses, encountering small risks, and learning how to navigate them independently. It meant boredom, improvisation, and discovery. It meant, quite simply, being in the world rather than looking at it.

Children doing structured arts & crafts indoor, 2024. vLicensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

Modern childhood, by contrast, is more likely to unfold indoors, under supervision, and through mediated experiences. Even when children are active, that activity is often organized—sports practices, lessons, scheduled events. These have their place, but they are not the same as open-ended, self-directed engagement.

What is fading is harder to quantify but easy to recognize: a sense of being fully present in one’s own body, in a real environment, without layers of abstraction in between.

This matters more than it might seem. A growing body of research links time spent outdoors with improvements in physical health, attention, and emotional well-being (Gill, 2014; McCormick, 2017). At the same time, higher levels of screen exposure—particularly in early childhood—have been associated with challenges in areas such as communication, attention, and daily functioning (Madigan et al., 2019). Some studies even suggest that outdoor play can partially offset the negative effects of excessive screen time, acting less as a competing activity and more as a necessary counterbalance.

A boy using an iPad in school, Lexie Flickinger, 2012, Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Taken together, these findings point to a deeper issue. Children today are not just spending less time outside—they are growing up with fewer opportunities to experience the world directly: physically, sensorially, and independently. Their environment is more controlled, more curated, and more abstract.

And this has consequences not only for how they relate to the world, but for how they relate to themselves.

An embodied childhood—one in which children feel at ease in their own bodies and surroundings—is becoming less common. Instead, there is a subtle shift toward self-consciousness, toward seeing the body as something to manage rather than simply inhabit. This is not solely the result of screen use, but screens amplify it. Children are exposed earlier to idealized, edited images of bodies, even as their own lived, physical experience becomes more limited.

The result is a striking imbalance: less familiarity with real, ordinary bodies, and more exposure to curated ones.

At the same time, another contradiction emerges. We have, as a society, become more cautious about the physical world. Children are taught to be vigilant in public spaces and to protect their privacy and their bodies. As I have written about elsewhere, this didn’t happen by accident or through “natural evolution,” but rather through a series of social processes involving first the “moral panic” movement, through the rise of the religious right, and finally converging in the “child protection” movement of the late 20^th Century.

We are sheltering our children to such an extent that they are afraid of the world. "Scared child." D Sharon Pruitt, 2009. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

The irony, of course, is that in the fervor to “protect” children’s bodies in the public sphere, they were robbed of their innocence, the concept of non-sexual nudity was erased, children’s natural status as non-sexual beings was destroyed, and instead these movements contributed to the hyper-sexualization of children so pervasive in modern western society.

This coexists with a parallel reality: children are spending increasing portions of their lives online—spaces that are far less bounded, far less transparent, and often more difficult for adults to monitor.

Research shows that children are encountering explicit content at younger ages, often unintentionally, and that digital environments can expose them to manipulation or predatory behavior in ways that are not always visible to caregivers (Livingstone & Smith, 2014; OECD, 2021).

This creates a paradox that is rarely articulated clearly. Children are taught to cover and protect their bodies in the physical world—where any risks are relatively visible and bounded. Yet they are simultaneously immersed in digital environments where those same bodies are abstracted, displayed, evaluated, and sometimes exploited at scale. In other words, in our hysterical attempts to shield our children from nudity, we sexualize them in a way never before seen in history.

In the physical world, the body is treated as something to protect. Online, it is often treated as something to display, evaluate, or commodify. Children are left to reconcile these conflicting messages.

Not long ago, we understood that children were non-sexual beings, that their bodies are natural, and that they are not harmed by being naked or seeing others naked. Children bathing in Djursholm, Stockholm, Sweden, in 1908.  Licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Over time, this shapes how they come to understand themselves. The body becomes something to think about, compare, and manage, rather than something to simply inhabit. Familiarity decreases, while self-consciousness increases.

This is where the conversation becomes more difficult, but also more important. In many modern contexts, even within the home, the body is handled cautiously—covered, monitored, and often subtly associated with embarrassment or risk. Norms around modesty vary widely across cultures, but there is evidence that increased body shame and objectification are linked to negative outcomes in well-being and self-image (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997; Daniels & Zurbriggen, 2016).

By contrast, some traditions take a more neutral approach. Naturist communities, for example, emphasize a matter-of-fact relationship with the body. In these contexts, the body is neither hidden nor emphasized—it is simply present. While this is not a model that most families will adopt, it highlights an important point: it is possible to grow up experiencing the body as natural and unremarkable, rather than as something to be constantly evaluated or concealed.

The point is not to prescribe a particular lifestyle, but to notice what has changed.

As childhood has become more mediated, it has also become more managed—physically, sensorially, and psychologically. Layers have been added: screens, schedules, supervision, and norms that shape how children move, play, and experience themselves.

The question, then, is not simply how to reduce screen time, but how to remove some of those layers—how to restore a sense of direct, unmediated experience.

For most families, the answer will not be radical. It will be incremental. It might mean making space for unstructured outdoor time, even when it is inconvenient. It might mean allowing children to get dirty, to take small risks, and to be bored. It might mean loosening the impulse to constantly manage and monitor. And, perhaps more quietly, it might mean fostering a more relaxed and less anxious attitude toward the body itself, within the bounds of what feels appropriate and comfortable.

We call our Community “clothing optional” – we do not mandate nudity, nor do we mandate clothing – and there is a good reason for that. We believe that our children should learn that their bodies are undramatic – they are not sexual threats that require hiding. Clothing, we should teach them, is about practicality (to the extent it can protect us against the elements and provide us with necessary pockets) and fun (many statements can be made through clothing and fashion), not about modesty.

Fredrik Ahlstedt, "Children on the Beach," 1889. Public Domain.

The goal is not nudity as an end in itself. Rather, it is to allow children to understand that their bodies are ordinary—that they are not inherently problematic or in need of constant management. In some contexts, that may include non-sexual nudity; in others, it may simply involve a more relaxed and matter-of-fact approach.

We believe that the healthy way forward for our children is through letting them play in nature – clothed or naked – as often as possible while simultaneously limiting their screentime and monitor what they do while on screens. Importantly, the nudity isn’t itself a solution, but teaching children that there is such a thing as non-sexual nudity reinforces their sense of Self as non-sexually active children, and that will make any online predator’s job of seducing them more difficult.

Because that is another important reality to understand: just as we cannot shield them from the physical reality, we cannot fully shield them from the virtual world, which is quickly becoming essential to human society. Instead, we must give our children the inner confidence and security to use technology wisely and productively.

None of this is easy, because the modern environment pulls in the opposite direction. It favors convenience over exploration, safety over independence, and stimulation over stillness. Screens fit seamlessly into that world. They are efficient, engaging, and always available.

But they are also, in a fundamental sense, a step removed from reality. If screens represent a childhood that is curated, controlled, and mediated, then what we are trying to recover is not simply time outside. It is something more basic: a way of being in which the world is experienced directly, through the body, in all its unpredictability. A childhood that is physical, unscripted, and real. And that may begin not with sweeping changes, but with small ones—with moments where children are allowed, once again, to step out from behind the screen and into the world, not just to observe it, but to feel it.

References

Daniels, E. A., & Zurbriggen, E. L. (2016). The Price of Sexy: Viewers’ Perceptions of a Sexualized Versus Nonsexualized Facebook Profile Photograph. Psychology of Popular Media Culture.

Fredrickson, B. L., & Roberts, T. A. (1997). Objectification Theory: Toward Understanding Women’s Lived Experiences and Mental Health Risks. Psychology of Women Quarterly.

Gill, T. (2014). The Benefits of Children’s Engagement with Nature: A Systematic Literature Review. Children, Youth and Environments.

Gray, P. (2011). The Decline of Play and the Rise of Psychopathology in Children and Adolescents. American Journal of Play.

Livingstone, S., & Smith, P. K. (2014). Annual Research Review: Harms Experienced by Child Users of Online and Mobile Technologies. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.

Madigan, S., et al. (2019). Association Between Screen Time and Children’s Performance on a Developmental Screening Test. JAMA Pediatrics.

McCormick, R. (2017). Does Access to Green Space Impact the Mental Well-being of Children? Journal of Pediatric Nursing.

OECD (2021). Children in the Digital Environment: Revised Typology of Risks. 

Tremblay, M. S., et al. (2015). Screen-Based Sedentary Behavior Research Network (SBRN) – Terminology Consensus Project. International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity.