One of the things that increasingly strikes me when I watch children outdoors is how unfamiliar many of them now seem with the living world. Not frightened exactly, but hesitant.

A bee becomes alarming. Mud becomes a problem. Long grass is treated as though it hides danger. Nettles are approached as though they are genuinely dangerous. Sometimes even the simple act of sitting on grass seems strangely unusual.

And yet, not very long ago, children disappeared into fields, ditches, hedgerows, parks and overgrown places for entire afternoons without anybody thinking much about it.

When nature was simply around us

When I was young, I would cycle several miles across Dublin to St Anne’s Park with a group of children my own age. We explored the woods and streams and hidden corners of the place completely unsupervised. Nobody was hovering nearby with hand sanitiser and warnings about risk assessments. We climbed things, fell occasionally, got dirty and came home again.

At home, I made my own little garden in the back yard when I was perhaps four years old. I surrounded it with shells and grew what most people would probably call weeds. To me, they were beautiful. Nobody told me they were the wrong flowers. Nobody explained that some plants were acceptable while others were not.

On holidays, we picked blackberries from hedgerows beside fields with cattle in them. We did not regard this as adventurous or educational. It was simply life. My mother used to say, in her best west Cork accent, “sure it’s good clean dirt!”

Looking back now, I realise something important about those experiences. They were not organised encounters with nature. Nature was simply around us and we were in it. We lived within it without thinking too much about it. That feels increasingly rare.

The children are not the main problem

I do not think children themselves are the main reason for this change. In many cases, the curiosity is still there. I see it constantly in the garden. Children are often fascinated by insects, seeds, ponds, worms, vegetables and flowers once they are given the chance to engage with them directly.

In fact, one of the things I have noticed repeatedly is that children become less anxious about nature when their parents are not present.

Adults, on the other hand, often seem deeply uneasy around the living world. There is a constant low-level anxiety around dirt, insects, weather, risk and disorder. We warn children not to climb, not to touch, not to wander, not to pick, not to taste.

Long grass becomes dangerous. Nettles become a crisis. A scraped knee becomes something to be prevented at all costs. More than once, I’ve seen a child reach eagerly for something: a worm, a feather, a stone even, only for an adult hand to pull them back with a quick, anxious, “No! That’s dirty.”

Tomatoes straight from the vine

One moment in the greenhouse stays with me.

A group of children were visiting the garden while cherry tomatoes were ripening on the vines. I offered them tomatoes directly from the plant, half expecting most of them to refuse.

Almost all of them ate one immediately, straight from the vine, warm from the greenhouse, still carrying that faint green tomato smell.

No washing. No packaging. No plastic tray. No barcode.

Of course, my immediate thought afterwards was that many institutions would probably regard this as irresponsible. Health and safety would have questions. Yet the tomatoes were growing without pesticides or chemicals. Why would they be dirty?

The strange thing is that the children themselves did not find the experience strange at all. It felt natural to them almost immediately. It revealed something important. The connection is not entirely lost. It is often still there, albeit in dormancy, stifled by much of modern life and the health-and-safety police.

Several stages removed from life

Many children now grow up several stages removed from the processes that sustain life. Food arrives from supermarkets wrapped in plastic. Soil is “dirt”, to avoid getting on your clothes. Insects are treated with suspicion or alarm. Nature is either entertainment on a screen, something carefully managed and supervised during organised outings, or simply ignored completely.

Human beings did not evolve in sterile environments separated from living systems. We evolved in relationship with weather, soil, animals, plants, water, risk and seasonal change. For most of human history, children learned through direct contact with the living world around them.

I increasingly suspect that something deeper than biodiversity is at stake here.

Children do not simply learn facts from nature. They learn relationship.

They learn where food comes from. They learn patience. They learn that life depends on other life. They learn that they themselves are not separate from the natural world but part of it.

And perhaps most importantly, they experience a kind of grounding that modern life often struggles to provide elsewhere.

When children spend time in functioning living environments, something in them seems to settle. They become calmer, more observant, more curious. They begin noticing things. A bee on a flower. A worm beneath a stone. The smell of soil after rain.

These are small experiences, but they help place a person within reality itself.

A hunger for reconnection

I think many adults are hungry for this reconnection too, even if they struggle to articulate it. We see signs of it everywhere now: people growing food again, interest in organic farming, pollinator projects, rewilding, community gardens, seed saving and wildlife-friendly spaces. People are increasingly sceptical of a completely artificial way of living.

Perhaps we are beginning to realise that convenience alone is not enough.

For generations, progress was often framed as escape from the land. The smart people got office jobs. They moved to cities. They left behind difficult rural lives, manual labour and dependence on the seasons. Speaking English was sophistication. Growing your own food was backward. Nature was something primitive people dealt with before modernity arrived.

And to be fair, much of that change brought real comfort and security: warmth, stability, predictability.

But perhaps something important was lost as well. Not just practical knowledge, but relationship with food, seasons, land, insects, weather and the living world itself.

Ordinary living places are enough

The tragedy is not simply that biodiversity is disappearing. It is that many people are losing the ability to feel fully at home within life itself.

Children, perhaps more than anyone, still need that sense of belonging. A child who understands they are part of a living world stands on firmer ground than one raised entirely within artificial systems designed to keep life tidy, controlled and at a distance.

I do not think children need perfect wilderness to find this connection. Most of the time they simply need access to ordinary living places.

A patch of long grass. A garden. A hedge. A pond.

Anywhere that lets life in and allows them to discover that they are part of it too: not visitors, not observers, but part of the living world.