At play in the fields of Westgrove

If you ask people about their happiest childhood memories, chances are they’ll remember joyful times playing outdoors with their families or friends. For me it was going every day to Rizal Park, and climbing into that concrete hippo’s mouth with my little cousins. Even the smell of pee in that hippo can’t ruin my memories of scrambling into that cave of wonders, from which we would survey our entire domain.

My American husband was luckier. Like writer Henry David Thoreau, he lived near his own Walden Pond, but discovered it much earlier. Scott grew up with a backyard in Massachusetts that opened onto a pond and acres of trees with vines, from which he would swing like Tarzan. Without even using a hammer and nails, he and his brothers built a tree fort overlooking the pond, and they’d spend every afternoon after school swimming, playing battle games, or picking apples from a nearby orchard. They didn’t have a lot of toys because they didn’t need them. "We had a great landscape you could do anything with, so we created our own worlds," he tells me. If that doesn’t sound idyllic, I don’t know what is.

Now that we have our own daughter, Isobel, we want her to have the same kind of experiences we had growing up. We want her to be able to play outdoors, breathe some fresh air, and let her imagination run free. We want her to see the beauty of nature with her own eyes; not through a TV or computer screen. As the old public-service announcement goes, "Life: Be in it."

In today’s wired world, though, there are fewer and fewer venues for kids to be in life. And sorry, going to the mall doesn’t qualify as an outdoor activity. Dr. Spock says that children need a minimum of three hours a day outdoors, but in Metro Manila with all its attendant pollution, that three hours could be more deadly than healthy.

So there are few better alternatives than moving out of our congested, polluted metropolis, to somewhere where there are a few green spaces left, with trees to supply some breathable oxygen. Down south, where there’s still room for intelligent master-planning, Ayala Land Premier has developed Westgrove Heights in Silang, Cavite, where one of the main attractions is the space – it’s wide, open and green – great for raising a family. For growing kids, in particular, Ayala has factored in lots of room for outdoor play.

Studies have shown that children raised in an environment where they can commune with nature are healthier physically and mentally than those living in concrete urban jungles with no parks, playgrounds, or green, open spaces.

"There are a number of factors why," says Dr. Anthony Guerrero, pediatrician and child and adult psychiatrist from the University of Hawaii. In crowded cities "there’s the likelihood of obesity, for example, with no safe or accessible place to exercise; there’s less chance of getting healthy meals; and increased stress levels for children."

One study shows that obesity among children is higher among those who live in poorly planned neighborhoods. While the environs were modern and well-maintained, there were few physical-activity resources and food sources on site. Fast-food restaurants were the most common food sources, with few other options available.

In another study, families from congested neighborhoods with no green spaces were relocated to a more suburban environment with gardens and space for yards. The move benefited not only the kids but also their parents, who were less likely to be exposed to disorder, abuse alcohol, and experience health problems. The adults were also more likely to be satisfied with neighborhood resources and ended up socializing more with their neighbors.

Sociologists have found many links between bad environments and inadequate physical care of children. Since there’s nowhere to play outdoors, kids have no choice but to stay in, often with absent or distracted parents or yayas whose main idea of babysitting is plopping their kid in front of a video screen. In essence, we’re raising a generation of wired kids who’ve never known life without computers, the Internet or 100 cable TV channels. And if you think, "Oh, they’re just technologically savvy," you don’t really know your wired child.

Studies in Europe and Asia have shown that children grow up faster watching TV. In Italy, researchers say that watching screens, regardless of whether it’s Ren & Stimpy or Sex and the City, helps to bring on early puberty and advance adolescence. Children reared on TV, computers and video games had lower levels of melatonin, the hormone that slows down the progress of children to sexual maturity and regulates sleep patterns, among other functions. Results show that the greater the exposure to television, the greater the number of early sexual experiences, including teen pregnancies.

In one local town, when children were deprived of TV, computers and video for a week, scientists detected a huge increase in the production of melatonin. Children between 6 and 12 who normally watched television an average of three hours a day stopped their viewing for seven days. Their families also used less artificial light. At the end of the week, the children’s melatonin levels had risen by an average of 30 percent, with the increases particularly marked in the youngest children.

"Some parents and grandparents are frightened because they don’t know how to keep the children occupied without television," observes one medical researcher. But with the great outdoors beckoning, waiting to claim your child’s imagination, that shouldn’t be a problem, even without toys.

Terry Gilliam, director of some of the most creative, imaginative films of our time, like Time Bandits and Brazil, recalls the "joyful childhood" that turned him into the visionary he is today: "We lived in the country and you play outside all the time," he says. "It was being outside all the time, it was inventing worlds, it was pre-television, so you found and created a world out there rather than sitting in front of a box and having the world presented to you. So it was a time of real imagination."