We live in a town with three beaches. There are two parts less than 10 minutes’ walk from home where neighborhood children gather to play. However, what my children want to do after school is pick up a screen — any screen — and stare at it for hours. They are not alone. Today’s children spend an average of four and a half hours a day looking at screens, split between watching television and using the Internet.

In the past few years, an increasing number of people and organisations have begun coming up with plans to counter this trend. A couple of years ago film-maker David Bond realised that his children, then aged five and three, were attached to screens to the point where he was able to say “chocolate” into his three-year-old son’s ear without getting a response. He realised that something needed to change, and, being a London media type, appointed himself “marketing director from Nature”. He documented his journey as he set about treating nature as a brand to be marketed to young people. The result was Project Wild Thing, a film which charts the birth of the World Network, a group of organisations with the common goal of getting children out into nature.

“Just five more minutes outdoors can make a difference,” David Bond says. “There is a lot of really interesting evidence which seems to be suggesting that if children are inspired up to the age of seven, then being outdoors will be on habit for life.” His own children have got into the habit of playing outside now: “We just send them out into the garden and tell them not to come back in for a while.”

Summer is upon us. There is an amazing world out there, and it needs our children as much as they need it. Let us get them out and let them play.

Turning soil, pulling weeds, and harvesting cabbage sound like tough work for middle and high school kids. And at first it is, says Abby Jaramillo, who with another teacher started Urban Sprouts a school garden program at four low-income schools. The program aims to help students develop science skills, environmental awareness, and healthy lifestyles.

Jaramillo’s students live in neighborhoods where fresh food and green space are not easy to find and fast food restaurants outnumber grocery stores. “The kids literally come to school with bags of snacks and large bottles of soft drinks,” she says. “They come to us thinking vegetables are awful, dirt is awful, insects are awful.” Though some are initially scared of the insects and turned off by the dirt, most are eager to try something new.

Urban Sprouts’ classes, at two middle schools and two high schools, include hands-on experiments such as soil testing, flower-and-seed dissection, tastings of fresh or dried produce, and work in the garden. Several times a year, students cook the vegetables they grow, and they occasionally make salads for their entire schools.

Program evaluations show that kids eat more vegetables as a result of the classes. “We have students who say they went home and talked to their parents and now they’re eating differently,” Jaramillo says.

She adds that the program’s benefits go beyond nutrition. Some students get so interested in gardening that they bring home seeds to start their own vegetable gardens. Besides, working in the garden seems to have a calming effect on Jaramillo’s special education students, many of whom have emotional control issues. “They get outside,” she says, “and they feel successful.”

A 1930s-ancient restaurant in my town has done little to update itself over the past 80 years. This is part of its charm, as is the wooden phone booth（亭）sitting neglected in the age of the cellphone. And we need it now more than ever.

For me it symbolizes that phone calls were once private affairs, even if the information being shared was not sensitive. In public places this meant resorting to the phone booth—a private space where one could converse in peace without being overheard.

When I grew up in the 1960s, phone calls used to be regarded as something private, even at home. However, within the space of very few years, private conversations have become public broadcasts, and being overheard seems to be the point. The problem, of course, is that we now carry our phones with us and answer the device as soon as it rings, but at the price of our privacy being disclosed!

Not long ago I was sitting in Boston's South Station, waiting for my train while a man was on his cellphone. I silently recited every detail of his phone conversation including his card number and its password. I stared at the fellow. He glanced at me, asking, "What?” My immediate response： Reciting all I had overheard to him, which left him opening his eyes wide.

There is no more privacy, no longer a sense of personal borders or limits. The cellphone has become a megaphone, making our privacy known so easily to others.

To return to phone booths： Why did they disappear? They used to be everywhere in my childhood and can readily serve as cellphone shelters today. A Mr. Riley had one in his small, struggling candy store where I grew up. Even at the age of 9, before I had acquired any life experiences, I would have labeled “private”, I would sometimes separate myself from my friends, close its door, and call home in peace and quiet.

Should you think a phone booth has no value today, I saw one on eBay going for $ 4,750.

And Mr. Riley would have flipped.