London - David Bond wanted to know how much his five-year-old daughter liked TV. “A hundred billion percent,” declared Ivy.
“Why?” asked her dad.
“Because it’s so relaxing,” she said, while maintaining constant eye contact with the screen.
Meanwhile, her brother Albie, three, was so immersed in a film on his iPad he did not register a flicker of interest when the word “chocolate” was hissed in his ear.
When David turned off the TV, confiscated the iPad and breezily announced they were going out for a walk in the fresh air, there was rebellion.
Ivy and Albie screamed in unison. They drummed their little heels against the sofa. David had to wrestle them into their coats and Wellingtons and manhandle them into the Great Outdoors.
This little scene is not unusual. On the contrary it is typical: children in Britain spend an average of four-and-a-half hours a day glued to a screen of some sort, and “outside” is a world as unappealing to them as it is alien and dull.
A recent survey by the National Trust found that three times more children could identify a Dalek than a magpie.
The impact of a sedentary lifestyle is alarming on many levels. Inactivity can lead to obesity, depression and behavioural problems.
This summer, the British Heart Foundation called for a return to a “traditional outdoors childhood” to prevent today’s children from being the first generation in history to have a lower life expectancy than their parents.
Spurred on by the fear that his own children were joining an army of “glassy-eyed zombies” who would, if left to their own devices, become fat, depressive couch potatoes, David, 41, a film-maker, decided to act.
He appointed himself to the ambitious, fictitious post of Marketing Director for Nature, setting up an office in the shed of his garden in south-east London.
Then he began the Herculean task of trying to make the natural world as enticing to our children as the many brands that clamour daily for their attention.
His quest to get his children outside is charted in his new film, Project Wild Thing.
But how can conkers, leaf snap and rolling down grassy slopes compete with Disney, Nintendo and iPads? At first, it seems, they can’t.
For one of the film’s first scenes after he is faced with his unenthusiastic children, David goes to a school in Eltham, South-East London, to meet a class of similarly sceptical 12-year-old girls.
“What do you think of nature?” he asks hopefully.
One girl tells how she was forced by her parents to go for a walk in the rain. It is a sartorial horror story.
“My mom made me put on a waterproof jacket and she pushed up the hood. It was all crinkly. I looked like a walking crisp packet.”
There are appalled gasps. Bravely, however, he persuades the girls to go outside.
For a while they kick their heels and affect sophisticated indifference. They mistake a hawthorn for a sycamore.
Then something miraculous happens. They start to enjoy themselves. There is laughter. They run around. They make daisy chains.
This, it seems, is the point: when children can be shoehorned out of their chairs and into the outdoors, it actually makes them happy.
“When children recall the most memorable times of their lives, they don’t remember days sitting in front of computers,” says David.
“Their favourite days were spent outside, having adventures. Every tree is a climbing frame, every shrub is a den.”
So what did David do? He devised a free Wild Time app to tempt children to make the bold step from the imagined world into the real one.
The app, for computers and mobile phones, suggests ideas for things to do, according to the amount of time you have to spend.
Got a minute? Spot a bird. An hour? Go on a treasure hunt. Collect feathers, stones and leaves.
And Ivy and Albie, it seems, took the bait. Before David embarked on his project, he strapped a camera to Ivy’s head to find out exactly how she spent her time.
“My inner geek needed numbers to work with,” he says. “I discovered that Ivy spent more than a quarter of her spare time on screens and just four percent of it outdoors; the same proportion as she spent in the bathroom.”
Eighteen months on, Ivy, now six, and Albie, four, spend 15 percent of their time outside, almost four times as much as before. Success!
This means that David and his wife Kate, 41, a publisher, have also become more active and outdoorsy.
The transition from inside to out was not, as David wryly observes, “a walk in the park”.
“After the initial screaming and tantrum-throwing there was quite a bit of grumpiness and dragging of heels from the children,” he says.
“We weren’t suggesting we all went and lived wild in the woods, but even small changes have a profound effect.
“We started by going out and discovering the wild places near our home. We went to Nunhead Cemetery, one of the Magnificent Seven cemeteries in London. It’s overgrown and very wild.”
Hmm! I can imagine the exaggerated eye-rolling that would be provoked in most households if mum and dad proposed a stroll in a graveyard.
But David and Kate persisted, with gratifying results.
“The idea was not to make it too structured,” says David.
“Middle-class childhood can be an overwhelming exercise in scheduling, which is madness when you consider that what children really like is a complete absence of structure.
“So we’d take along sketch books and pencils, perhaps a picnic. We gave the children a cheap camera so they could take their own photos.
“We’re always surprised by what grabs their imagination: a murky puddle with a couple of plastic bottles floating on it, a dead crow’s wing.
“Ivy has started collecting things, such as feathers, stones and leaves. Albie has a fascination with dead things.
“Grown-ups can also forget that children’s imaginations are not fired by the same things as theirs. We went for a walk in the Yorkshire Dales and at the top of a hill was a beautiful view.
“But Ivy and Albie were more interested in a snail colony under a rock and spent 45 minutes rearranging them.”
In the film, David co-opts Ivy into being his Wild Time poster girl. She is pictured, a huge grin on her face, licking a frog.
“That’s unhygienic!” protests one of the schoolgirls he shows it to. But David is unperturbed.
He has naturalist and TV presenter Chris Packham on his side. Chris blames adults for the epidemic of squeamishness.
“It’s adults who say ‘No’ to children, who don’t want them to pick up worms — or even to eat worms,” he says.
(Evidently, Chris believes that eating worms is an entirely acceptable pastime.) “I think we’ve become afraid of the outdoors,” says David.
“We now believe that there’s a paedophile on every corner, when in fact 99.9 percent of strangers are actually decent, kind people.”
At times, David gets carried away on the flood tide of his enthusiasm. Kate reminds him that there are real hazards for children in the outside world. Traffic, for starters.
That said, he believes a modicum of freedom, even for children as young as Ivy and Albie, is essential in building their confidence.
His children may not actually volunteer to go outside without prompting, but these days they embrace the idea when David and Kate propose it.
This development is gratifying for David’s mother Helen, 81, who shares their home.
“She thought we’d lost our way a bit as parents and that we’d never see the light,” says David.
“When my sister and I were growing up we went outside a lot.
“So she’s delighted her grandchildren are doing more outside. One weekend we all went blackberrying. Then we picked up the windfall apples in the garden and made a pie together.
“Nothing beats that kind of family time.”
There will, I suspect, be parents who are loath to swap the freedom their children’s screen time affords them; who do not relish exchanging a few hours of peace for a muddy tramp through autumnal leaves.
Outdoors is, for many hard-pressed parents, messy, disordered and bothersome.
David has some sympathy with this view. “But what’s a little mud in the great scheme of things? You have to be relaxed about it. It’s OK to romp in a puddle. Our children’s outdoor clothes are permanently caked in mud. Occasionally they get a good hosedown.
“An encounter with dirt and mud won’t kill them. In fact, it boosts their immune systems.
“The app clears cluttered minds. It frees creativity. It promotes concentration. And it’s really great fun.” - Daily Mail
David’s film and the Wild Time app are available at projectwildthing.com