It was a beautiful sunny and warm July Saturday afternoon in Wisconsin. The kind of day we dream about for roughly six months out of the year. Puffy clouds decorated a bright blue sky as the thermometer flirted with 80 degrees.

Regrettably I was sitting in front of my own computer, wishing I had some friends to play with and a time machine to jet back to 1969, when my son called.

“You want to go play some stickball?” he asked.

Ten years removed from my last stickball game, an aching back and knees that creak like the Tin Man’s, I hesitated for maybe a second, then gladly accepted the challenge to turn back the clock forty years and act like I was twelve again.

Stickball is a game that has many versions. Our version involves a milk crate filled with tennis balls, a little league field and a legion of imaginary fielders. Unlike the movie Field of Dreams, nobody can actually see our fielders, but they make plays all game long. And unlike the video game version we use our entire body to participate, not just our thumbs.

Please, don’t try to tell me right here, that Nintendo Wii is just like the real thing. It isn’t.

We never actually played a game, instead choosing to take extended batting practice. Spread out among the four of us, none within a decade of our teenage years, I calculated that we each took a hundred or more swings, tossed at least that many pitches and even hit the field to run down some fly balls. A couple of shoe-string catches and a handful of homeruns and my day was complete. There was no time machine, but for three hours my mind and a reluctant body truly went back in time.

As I stood in the outfield worrying about whether or not the next fly ball would result in a pulled hamstring, I wondered how we got here. To a place where kids wasted countless hours in front of a television screen and a baseball field and a city park could be vacant of any kids on a gorgeous Saturday in the middle of the summer. Where had “Smalls, Squints, Benny and Yeah-Yeah gone?”

I remembered taking my son to his first t-ball practice where he spent more time swinging at mosquitoes than baseballs. And on the way home he asked if we could just go to the park and practice instead of joining t-ball. Even at age six or seven he could figure out which was more fun and I would argue more beneficial.

How many kids have spent a Saturday standing in the outfield, only to catch two balls, and go to the plate five times to take a dozen swings? You learn how to cover some ground when you are the only outfielder and you learn how to cover the plate when you are swinging at every pitch your buddy tosses.

Memories of tennis ball elbow and hitting pop flies to my son on the playground came streaming back. Yet those hours would fail in comparison to the hours he spent playing wiffle ball in the backyard with his best friend.

The AAA, AAU, All Stars generation will certainly dismiss this story as old school ramblings, just not relevant in today’s society. If our kids had as many A’s on their report cards as they do on their jerseys they wouldn’t have to worry about an athletic scholarship. Too many parents no longer believe in the “sandlot” or the “pond”. Learning can only take place when someone is there to guide us, praise us and hand us a trophy. If it doesn’t come with a team jacket it can’t be worth much.

Kids don’t go to the park anymore because we are too fearful. Worried that they will talk to strangers or take a line drive off the forehead. They don’t go because we have their schedules so filled up with organized activities that they have no free time to be a kid anymore. When faced with the choice between a video box and box of balls they choose electronic baseball over the real deal because, thanks to us, they have a choice. I would like to think I would have done different if the same options were presented to me forty years ago, but I doubt it.

As much as I depend on my computer I contemplated the trade-off that modern technology has created. My old typewriter, sitting on a table in my office, for a moment didn’t look so bad.

Now we have to bribe kids to get them outside. A pat on the back to the NFL for their “get out and play, an hour a day” campaign, but aren’t we setting the bar embarrassingly low? Limiting our outdoor play time to an hour a day would have been considered child abuse when I was growing up. The landscape of youth sports has been completely changed by us, the parents.

Recently my wife and I were discussing perceived short-comings of our own kids. The conversation eventually brought the responsibility back on our shoulders. As I walked away I was compelled to ask, “Why is it always our fault?”

The truth hurts, but all is not lost.

We can reclaim that which we have surrendered. You can turn off the television and garage sale the X-box, disconnect the cell phone and say no to the AAA All Stars and give kids no choice but to find something else to do. After all that is why we went outside and played in our day, because there was nothing better to do. In this struggling economy let’s call it down-sizing your child’s life. As in business, the cuts can be painful, but in the long run beneficial.

As we shagged the tennis balls one last time, a lone family finally showed up to walk the dog and spend about fifteen minutes at the playground, three hours, one family.

We can spin this anyway we want, but it is a poignant statement about the unintended consequences of making our kid’s lives easier or better than ours were.

It is time to seal off Pandora’s X-Box and pull in the reigns on coach Reilly (It’s not worth winning, if you can’t win big) and send our kids back outside to play—with each other—no adults—just a box of balls and their imaginations. They will figure it out…if we just give them the opportunity.