When I was a child, I spent most of my time outdoors. I had tree houses and houses made of straw bales in a nearby barn. A friend owned two ponies: together we'd ride for hours, constructing fantasies of being knights of old or Wild-West cowboys. I went fishing in a local stream with my father, catching the occasional trout and cooking it over a fire hastily constructed out of sticks, and eating it on the spot – just minutes after it had been swimming upstream. At night I'd fall asleep planning what I'd do in the great outdoors the following day.

I thought it was a normal childhood (and I thought it quite normal that we'd all occasionally break an arm or an ankle), but reading Richard Louv's American bestseller, Last Child in the Woods, has made me see just how privileged it was. Today's children might be well