There is a generation of children growing up right now who have never felt an earthworm wriggle between their fingers. Who’ve never sat still long enough in nature to hear it breathe. Who know what a coral reef looks like from a YouTube video, but have never stood at the edge of the Pacific and felt genuinely small. These are our children — and we handed them a screen instead of a world.
Today’s children are the most digitally connected, and nature-disconnected, generation in human history, and we’ve normalized this far too quickly. Children aged eight to 18 in the United States now spend an average of seven and a half hours a day on screens — without including schoolwork. They’re wandering fictional worlds in Minecraft, shooting at each other in Fortnite, and scrolling through endless TikTok videos. They are experiencing life through the compressed, curated and algorithmically optimized screen.
Meanwhile, just outside, one of the most ecologically remarkable places on Earth waits, largely ignored. We have equated asphalt and connectivity with progress, and have equated nature with inconvenience. We’ve told ourselves this was preparing them for the modern world. Yet, the world they are “being prepared” for grows bleaker by the year.
Historic hurricanes, storms, tornadoes, floods, droughts and wildfires are becoming more frequent, intense and destructive. Not to mention the projected water scarcity and toxic chemical accumulation in our crops and food. There will also be less wildlife than there is now.
Experts estimate the current extinction rate is 1,000 to 10,000 times higher than the normal rate, meaning that more and more species disappear every year. The emperor penguin; blue whale; Asian and African elephant; pangolin; Sumatran and black rhino; northern white rhino; and mountain gorilla still exist, however tenuously, in the world our parents passed down to us. But they may exist only in picture books by the time today’s children come of age.
This is the inheritance we are quietly creating for them. The cruel irony is that the antidote to so much of what ails our children — the anxiety, the disconnection, the developmental delays — is available a short drive away. Research consistently shows that nature reduces stress, improves attention and supports emotional regulation in children.
A walk through a trail is one of the lowest-cost, highest-return family activities available to us. Nature makes children feel that the natural world belongs to them, and that they belong to it. That sense of belonging is precisely what conservation depends on. In the words of Sir David Attenborough, “If children do not grow up knowing about nature and appreciating it, they will not understand it, and if they don’t understand it, they won’t protect it.”
Within an hour’s drive of downtown San Diego, you can walk among the Torrey pines above the Pacific, wade through the creek crossings of Los Peñasquitos Canyon, watch the sundown over sandstone cliffs at Sunset Cliffs Natural Park, or hike the chaparral hills of Mission Trails Regional Park. We live in a place of extraordinary biodiversity — and many of our children have never experienced any of it.
Parenthood has been quietly redefined as a procurement exercise. We measure our devotion in devices and subscriptions, in the latest gaming console or the newest tablet. We owe them the memory of getting genuinely dirty, of being rained on, of watching something wild and feeling the particular kind of awe that cannot be streamed.
Consider enrolling your kids in a summer nature camp. Programs such as Coastal Kiddos, KidWings Nature School, Nature Scouts Collective, Mission Trails Regional Park day camps, YMCA outdoor programs and UCSD’s Knock Around Camp provide hands-on experiences in local ecosystems, outdoor skills and environmental education. The San Diego Parks Foundation’s Come Play Outside program offers free and low-cost activities across San Diego.
Organizations including Outdoor Outreach, Earth Discovery Institute, Ocean Discovery Institute, Living Coast Discovery Center and Family Adventures in Nature offer year-round outdoor programs for children and families. And for a simple weekend outing, resources like Get Outside San Diego, AllTrails, and the San Diego Hikes app make it easy to find kid-friendly trails and outdoor adventures throughout the county.
So let’s celebrate Father’s Day with our children outside. This means saying yes to the sweaty hike when it’s easier to stay home. It means choosing a weekend walk over a weekend of wi-fi, and modeling, with our own behavior, that the natural world is worth our time. San Diego makes it easier than almost anywhere else.
Let’s take them outside while there’s still something left to show them.
Arturo Angeles is an environmental conservation professional, San Diego resident and a concerned father.
