Where are the kids?

I must sound like an old man when I ask something like this. But this is something I have observed over the last few years and as I was out in the evening last week and this afternoon, I was wondering - where are the kids?

When I was much younger, about five, we moved into an apartment. Over the course of the next five or six years, I spent almost every evening of over forty weeks a year playing, running, chatting with other kids in the apartment complex. Come summer and out we were, playing - unmindful of the heat, scowls of housewives whose peace we were wrecking with our screams and the wrath of the people whose windowpanes we shattered. As I grew up, my activities grew more restricted to school and looking back, that was not healthy at all. I knew few of the kids in my neighbourhood when we shifted houses from a different city and all my sporting activities were restricted to the school. But the times spent playing, chatting, whispering to each other, irritating our parents were integral to growing up. But I noticed, the younger one was doing none of that- more time was being spent reading, watching television and summers were spent attending some class which my parents wouldn't have dared enrolling me to for fear of the tantrums I would throw and more importantly because they knew that I would be doing something that didn't involve the idiot box.

Admittedly, kids these days do much more than I did when I was younger. True, the lure of television, internet is far greater. And yes, the roads are more congested and many apartments don't have the space inside their compunds. Are schools more demanding? Maybe. Kids spend their summer attending classes, camps, being out on vacation- basically being occupied. It has its benefits I guess. But in my view, being a kid, outside the watchful eyes of adults around you, playing as you will, unconstrained by time limits is far more important to growing up.

The more worrying sign about all this is the lack of interaction with and knowledge of the people around us. In large apartment complexes, people hardly seem to notice (forget know) their neighbours. This I observed when I went to meet a friend and I lost his door number. No one but the watchman knew the door number when I mentioned the same- there was the careless shrug, the puzzled look, the raised eye-brow that such a name existed in the neighbourhood.
(It could very well have been that guy's fault but these are still dangerous signs).
This attitude of adults tends to rub off onto children and we seem to grow more and more apart. True, people want their privacy but interaction is equally important I guess. It's important that you don't grow up as just another person, family in the neighbourhood. People around you know you as a person and not as a door number. I don't know if these things will happen, I don't know whether when I move on I will know my neighbours or whether I'd want my kids out playing in the heat but maybe I'll come back to this post someday and think about it.