One noise that children are guaranteed to hear this half term is not the cuckoo, or the sound of wind rustling through the trees, but that of parents moaning, "Get off that bloody computer, and play outside." Forceful mums and dads will try loading their "screenagers" in the car to take them for a walk. More certainly would, if they had been reading the new edition of Richard Louv's book, Last Child in the Woods.

Five years ago, when the book was first published, Louv's was the first voice heard in what is becoming a dawn chorus of concern about the way children are deprived of nature. He went so far as to call this disconnect an illness – Nature Deficit Disorder – the symptoms of which include depression, hyperactivity, boredom and loneliness. All of these problems have been increasing, along with obesity rates, as children spend more time either indoors, or in cars, glued to screens and divorced from nature. According to a survey by Natural England, less than a quarter of children (24 per cent) visit a local patch of green weekly, whereas 53 per cent of their parents did.

Louv's concerns were echoed last week by Sir David Attenborough. Speaking at the tenth anniversary of the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, the presenter of numerous wildlife series lamented the various obstacles – parental fear, health and safety rules, and laws against collecting fossils or wild flowers – that prevent children from "roaming the countryside" in the way that he did eighty years ago, as a child in Leicestershire.

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