What can Britain do to “bring back childhood”?

I’m sat in a soft play with my two kids daydreaming about how different their childhood is to my own. They lead very organised, very safe, hopefully happy lives but there is no risk, they barely get the chance fall out with friends and make up, there’s zero adventure or surprise.

With a rise in poor mental health in young people, I’m worried that I’m not providing the tools they need to navigate being a teenager and young adult. Parenting feels largely based on fear and assessed risk and it might be hurting us.

I guess, in my soft play inspired boredom, I’m asking, what can we do to change things and should we?

Edit: well this kept me occupied for the afternoon!

Got a lot of advice saying basically kick them out the front door and wait for social services! For what it’s worth, we do the whole sports club, swimming, dog walks, parks thing. My kids are actually far more sporty than I was! In saying that, these things are all organised/supervised/ as safe as possible and that was kind of my point.

We also have time restrictions on screens and they aren’t having a phone until high school, a thing we get a lot of grief off from parent mates.

It feels more like it needs to be a societal change rather than down to individual choices. If all kids were out playing it would be normalised to a certain extent. As it stands, we’ve managed to monetise parenting and free time almost completely.