This semester I finished teaching Knots in My Yo-Yo String, the autobiography of Jerry Spinelli, and it truly was a homecoming. About fifteen years ago I taught his Newberry Award winning novel Maniac Magee, the story of a heroic orphan who, through his exploits and pure heart, unites a segregated town.

As I read the life history of my favorite children's author, I saw how he transformed his life story into fiction. Like his hero, he moved from the east side of the town to the west side of his town. I saw where he got the settings of the “Bandshell” and the trolley tracks.  I saw how he came up with Cobbler's Knot and why the theme of segregation was so important to him. Maniac Magee is dominated by a world of kids; in fact, the subtitle with the title is: The Autobiography of a Kid.

Jerry Spinelli doesn’t say this message outright, but the theme of his autobiography is as obvious as the nose… well, you know.  Spinelli is asserting that Life was much better as a kid li growing up in the fifties.  His narrative is full of stories filled with interactions with other kids in the form of rock fights, bike rides, hikes through woods, wandering on the streets of Norristown and wasting time doing absolutely nothing.  Rarely do adults grace his pages; and yes, there are structured athletic competitions, but nothing like the grist mill youth sports is today.

If you are over thirty-five and you live in America, let me ask you a question. Do you see kids playing outside? Playing pick-up basketball games? Football games? Riding bikes? Hanging out? Wandering in the forest? Taking their shoes off and wandering in creeks, looking for crawdads and salamanders?

I know what you are saying: "Bobby, you’ve turned fifty. You've traded in your youth to become a cynical curmudgeon. H.L. Mencken, Mark Twain. W.C. Fields  move over!" Well, that maybe so, but is it my imagination or are kids spending more time before some kind of screen: inert, isolated and ignored?

Richard Louv, in his book Last Child in the Woods, makes a compelling case for Nature Deficit Disorder.  As America’s children have given up on the outdoors, we have seen an increase in the diagnosis in ADD and ADHD. Now these trends may have occurred because of the growth of the counseling and therapy industry and the growth of the pharmaceutical industry, but my gut is saying that if children get more exercise and time outdoors, the symptoms of ADD and ADHD will decrease.

Louv provides the title of “The Criminalization of Natural Play” to one of his chapters. Here he discusses the growing number of gated communities in the American landscape. These planned neighborhoods present an interesting wrinkle to the idea of democracy.  On NPR, I heard the story of a marine and Vietnam Vet. who wanted to put a forty foot flagpole and large American flag on is front lawn.  The homeowners had major problems with this gesture and fought him in the courts over this issue.

 Imagine if you are a kid with free time in one of these communities. If you step out of line, what will be the consequences? Well, let’s just say that they’re much more serious than the penalties we faced when we were young. Yes, television and the Internet are bringing kids inside, but there are a lot more factors to this equation.

You might be saying, “Hey Bobby, you’ve written a lot of hubs lately. Are you addicted to this form of social networking? Are you spending exorbitant time in front of the screen?”

 And the answers to these questions maybe yes. However, before I finished this article, I played tennis with a friend who is currently a high school American history teacher.  I had lost touch with him and both of us realized that summer is the time for teachers to re-connect with their friends.  We practiced a variety of shots; we ran around and laughed. Then we split open two Heinekens and talked about the causes of the financial meltdown, Jefferson’s ideal of the yeoman farmer and Andrew Jackson’s dislike of the national bank. As we walked to our cars to return to our respective families, we saw the stars in the sky and we heard the intermittent songs of the crickets and frogs.  Ah….Not bad. Not bad at all.