A few months ago I walked into the playroom to find my son and his friends staring at a video game. It was a beautiful day outside, custom-made for active, 7-year-old boys, but the only thing this group was moving was thumbs.

"Go outside and do something adventurous," I told them.

They shuffled through the door, looking nonplussed, but soon enough were running around on the hill in the backyard. I didn't hear a word from them for hours.

After his friends went home, my son came in covered with dirt holding an equally filthy box.

"We were pirates and we made a hideout in the woods. We buried treasure and dug it up, too!" he said, smiling ear to ear.

Inside the box were red leaves, acorns and rocks.

Later that evening the phone rang and it was the mom of one of my son's friends.

"All my son can talk about is the game they played today. Where did you buy it?" she asked.

That question begged another: If it could be bought, what would it be worth?

A week later I met Jaime Matyas, executive vice president of the National Wildlife Federation, at a conference where she was speaking about children and nature.

According to Ms. Matyas, the average American child spends four to seven minutes playing outside a day, versus six hours in front of some kind of electronic screen. "Kids know corporate logos better than the trees in the yard," she said.

I loved the willow tree in our yard growing up but I wasn't sure my kids think twice about the oak or maple we have now. For my generation, and generations before us, childhood was spent outdoors. We didn't know it was good for us, it's just what we did.

Ms. Matyas: "By playing outside, unstructured and unsupervised, kids learned life lessons, problem solving, creativity. Kids who had attention challenges had an outlet, a place to go, they could blow off steam. They knew the neighborhood in the different seasons, they knew the creek or they had a favorite tree. People are just starting to look back now and are realizing that, as a nation, the unintended results of kids spending so much less time outside are enormous and frightening."

As playtime has moved indoors, childhood obesity rates have soared and symptoms of ADHD and depression have risen. Time outside, or lack thereof, affects kids mentally and physically.

Kim Janocko, a mother of four who lives in Monroeville, described what happens after her kids play outdoors: "The kids get along better, they're happy and relaxed and they sleep really, really well." I've heard this from a lot of parents.

The impact is felt in the classroom, as well. Research shows that when schools have outdoor playtime, attention spans and test scores improve. Yet outdoor play is increasingly being squeezed out as schools tighten budgets or add time for tests.

Mary Modoono, a teacher at Shady Side Academy Junior School in Point Breeze, has seen the benefits of outdoor play in her second-grade classroom over the last 21 years. The skills acquired help kids learn.

"The process of learning is much like the process of unstructured play. You try things out, you use your own judgment, you stick with it and work it through," Mrs. Modoono said. As kids increasingly get bombarded with fast-paced stimulation through electronic games, computers and TV, it's even more important to cultivate skills like tenacity and patience by letting kids create and imagine through independent playtime, she says.

At the end of each school year, Mrs. Modoono takes her class to an Amish dairy farm.

"It is my favorite part of the trip watching my high-tech students interact with the Amish children. They play games together -- tag, jump rope, running and chasing each other. Sometimes they try to teach each other a new game. Some gather by the fence to coax a cow to come closer. Some children try their luck with the wooden hoops on the dirt road that runs between the farmhouse and the barn. Always reluctantly, my students board the bus to head home. At this time, I think perhaps children haven't changed that much after all.".

Last year the National Wildlife Federation launched a national campaign aimed at getting families outside called Be Out There (nwf.org). It addresses barriers that get in the way of kids and families spending time outdoors, including safety concerns, busy lives and even not knowing what to do or how to do it.

Ms. Matyas believes moms are key. When moms learn how critical outdoor time is, they make it happen in their own families and spread the word.

Since getting to know Ms. Matyas (a mother herself) and her team at the Wildlife Federation, I've been helping them connect with moms. We recently kicked off a "Founding Moms" advisory board of influential mom bloggers from around the country.

My getting involved with this issue has sent my own family outside much, much more often, and it's made me ask myself: If my day is spent attached to a computer, why should my kids be any different?

Kim Daboo, a mother of two from Point Breeze who works in IT and is a self-professed computer nerd, helped me think this through.

"Technology is not going away, that's the reality. As long as it's managed or a certain amount of time for it is set for kids, I don't see it as a problem. And, you can always combine the two, like with geo-caching. There has to be an app for that!" she said.

Geo-caching?

Geocaching is high-tech treasure hunting, where people around the world hide things and post the locations online, including GPS coordinates. The hiders, seekers and finders can then blog about their adventures at sites like geocaching.com.

Cool!

The other night over dinner my husband and I asked the kids to name a favorite thing they've done and every one of them named something that happened outside, often when we were together as a family.

Once spring comes, when the school bus gets home in the afternoons, I'm moving my office to the bench in the driveway.

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