To counter the historic trend toward the loss of wildness where children play, it is clear that we need to find ways to let children roam beyond the pavement, to gain access to vegetation and earth that allows them to tunnel, climb, or even fall. And because formal playgrounds are the only outdoors that many children experience anymore, should we be paying more attention to planting, and less to building on them? Naturalist Franklin Burroughs is among those who have argued that children need places where they can roughhouse on tree limbs and swing on vines without being told that the plants are hands-off: “Better to let kids be a hazard to nature,” Burroughs told a gathering of conservationists, “and let nature be a hazard to them” (9). […]

In a word, playfulness may be the essence of wilderness experience (12).

~ The Geography of Childhood