Back yard blues

You wouldn’t know it, just from looking. The sun-baked barbecue grills, drooping tomato plants and hissing sprinklers offer no clues.

But countless perfectly ordinary backyards have been the scenes of amazing summertime adventures over the years.

Cowboys battled Indians. Invading freakazoids from outer space encountered stiff opposition from Earth-defending dinosaurs and the FBI. The home team came back to score 11 runs in the ninth inning of the seventh game to win the World Series. Quicksand, lava monsters and kryptonite were everywhere.

You didn’t hear about any of that on the news, of course, because those are stories played out in the imaginations of children.

Once upon a time, anyway.

But as more kids become hyper-scheduled with planned activities and spend increasing amounts of time indoors with TV, computers and video games, it’s fair to ask: Has the backyard lost its magic?

Do children still sprint out the back door and then spend an hour engrossed by the seeming chaos of ants in action? Can kids build an orbital research station by draping a blanket over lawn chairs or transform a treehouse into a besieged frontier fort?

It depends.

OK, a little skepticism is in order. After all, each generation tends to regard the prevailing moods and modes of its childhood as sacrosanct.

So have things really changed, or is this just the self-absorbed hand-wringing of graying cranks drunk on nostalgia?

“We have fundamentally restructured childhood,” said Dr. Dimitri Christakis, a professor of pediatrics and director of the Child Health Institute at the University of Washington. “And I don’t think that we know what all the effects of it will be.”

Some observers say more childhood obesity and stunted creativity are two possibilities.

Christakis believes we are “overprogramming” our kids.

For several reasons, he is a big fan of unstructured play.

Once, of course, that was not regarded as a developmental issue. It was just called being a kid.

All right, not everyone had a blissful childhood. Moreover, not all of us grew up with a verdant, suburbs-style backyard.

But for millions of Americans of a certain age who emerged from their upbringing more or less emotionally intact, the small field of dreams behind the house could be a mystical landscape. No-uniforms sports, invented activities and total immersion in self-scripted fantasy were the answers to “What is there to do?”

Well, first you deploy your toy soldiers. Then you bombard the enemy positions with artillery rounds (dirt clods).

Or you catch an insect in a jar and cackle, “He’s aliiiiiiiive!”

Or you crawl under a bush and wait for the popsicle-sucking zombies to come and eat your brain.

Or you engage in a frank and open debate about the key difference between freckles and cooties.

The list is longer than a fat spool of kite string.

Those images can stick in your memory, like personalized visions of some long-ago Tom Sawyer summers.

“Just the other night my husband and I were in the backyard telling our daughter about the fun games we used to play when younger – kick the can, red light/green light, red rover red rover, et cetera,” said Denise Masiello of Spokane.

To Faith Masiello, who is about to turn 12, that must have sounded like a dispatch from an alien culture. For one thing, there just aren’t many kids her age in her neighborhood.

Faith is acquainted with at least one backyard classic, though. She likes putting up a tent and sleeping back there. It has become a family tradition. “We also put my dog Nellie’s bed in there,” said Faith. “She sleeps with us.”

The soon-to-be seventh grader enjoys it better than traditional backwoods tenting. “When you’re out camping-camping, there are mosquitoes and bugs you’ve never seen before.”

Taylor Sinclair, a 7-year-old in Spokane Valley, described his summer. “I go to a lot of camps and stuff,” he said.

Occasionally, he pretends that he is really tall.

He flatly rejected the notion that kids his age don’t know what the no-school season is all about. “I would say that we have things that are really fun that you might not think of as fun.”

Fair enough. Still, advocates of children learning to entertain themselves suggest that formal lessons, organized athletics and adult-directed recreation aren’t quite the same as freewheeling explorations of the imagination.

You know, the kind launched by parental urging to “Go outside.”

“There absolutely is value to unstructured play,” said Molly Kretchmar-Hendricks, chair of the psychology department at Gonzaga University.

Psychologist David Elkind, author of “The Power of Play,” has a famous quote: “Learning teaches us what is known, play makes it possible for new things to be learned.”

This is 2007, however. Times have changed. Nothing is simple.

UW’s Christakis, who has studied the “technologizing” of childhood, outlined the forces lined up against unsupervised outdoors play.

“1. Parents are busier – more work, longer commute, longer hours.

“2. Parents are anxious – fear of abductions reinforced by seemingly weekly amber alerts makes them reluctant to just let their kids roam free as we did.

“3. Parental ambitions – other kids start playing sports early, so mine had better do so too or they will be left behind.”

He said many moms and dads have adopted the view that summer is the time for children to get better at something, whether it is computer skills or basketball.

Anything else is supposedly a waste of time.

“I think something is lost when we adopt that way of thinking,” said Christakis.

The Visco sisters in Spokane Valley might agree.

Jaedynn, 11, and Devan, 9, said their summer is punctuated with an abundance of free play. And are their imaginations alive and well?

Jaedynn suggested that anyone watching her play with her dolls would be quickly reassured on that front. For her part, Devan has been known to play checkers against her hamster.

But what if you are a parent and your kids drop the b-word?

“When my children tell me they’re bored, I tell them it’s not my problem,” said Christakis. “My job is to provide them with a place to safely play and be creative. It’s not to entertain them 24 hours a day.”

Besides, he knows a secret that has been handed down from the ancient hide-‘n’-seekers, water balloonists and Wiffle Ballers.

“Boredom begets creativity.”

And there’s no better lab for those experiments than the backyard.

Tag. You’re “it.”