For their health.
> If they become adult white collar workers they will be indoors most of the time, interacting with technology.
Which is bad enough. But if they've led an active life as children, their base health profile will be vastly better than if they'd been sedentary since they were toddlers, and many of them might even carry the habit of physical exercise with them into adulthood. This will vastly improve their quality of life from as early as their late twenties, and definitely by their forties.
(Source: I was a bookworm from [before?] first grade, never took an interest in sports, and obese from my teens... And I was still probably more active as a child than many children today. Basic military training was Hell, and the metabolic syndrome I was diagnosed with in my mid-late forties blossomed into full-on type II diabetes in my early fifties. Not super fun.)
> I loved being outside as a kid and teen, but is it really deleterious if the new generations don't get exposed to that?
Not for us perhaps, but for them.
see https://www.aao.org/editors-choice/sunlight-exposure-reduces...
I remember wanting badly to watch "Green Acres", but my parents put their foot down and said it was garbage and I couldn't watch it.
When Netflix rolled around, I finally had an opportunity to watch it. About 10 minutes in, I concluded my parents were right and that was the end of that.
I had a public school teacher who went way above & beyond, introduced us to technology & computing (bringing his own PC's into the class room, which we only used very occasionally) & ham radio (although the planned club never really materialized). This gave me a much stronger relationship to the world I'd face, & began a genuine interest in the world in me.
Kids are blank slates- tabula rasa- & they need models of engagement & things to grow interested in over time. Simply expecting play & fun time, without specific encouragement to go deeper, without examples of others about them who are interested & are going deep into things- is an extreme danger. It's been so hard seeing so many so adrift, wishing so badly these people had had more exposure to different things in the world where they might moor themselves.
Technology is fantastically difficult to root into in todays world, is oppressively technocratically nightmarishly resilient to exploration & playing with at any genuinely technical level. But it's still more accessible, a bigger open field, with so vastly much wider open potential (in part because this rotten technocratically driven core is so low-nutrient & exploitative & unwilling to do anything but suck down our life energies, not contributing value) than so so so much else in the world that I yearn so much to see some of the near breakthroughs that could happen anytime. I have deep reverence for biology, medicine, chemistry, material science, design, ux, for so music & culture & art, but wow, so many of these require so much more dedication & luck to break through in, to run the gauntlet of. Computers still seem so rife with potential as a place I'd want people to seek engagement, in spite of their sad hulky rebuffing outer shell of "user interface" that lies & betrays, that is Plato's Cave's Marionette scene, endlessly lying to us.
Kids have so much cognitive surplus. They have so much potential. Pretending that you know better, denying them mediums of thought they might explore & forcing them into simplicity, prolonging their childhood forcibly, is not something I am sympathetic to. Clay Shirky had a 2008 conference talk that electrified the world, on cognitive surplus, contrasting Watching Gilligan's Island versus Editing Wikipedia[1]. These words weren't used but it was a contrast of inert, useless, goes-no-where activity versus the chance to engage in something, in starting the ability to find your own meaning. This process should not be force-started upon kids, and there is a lot of inert, dead end uses of technology they'll hook themselves on & click endlessly. But to deny the whole project, to opt them out of exploring the deeper angles of the world- that's a bad mistake I'd wish on no one. Tech, in spite of all the bad I've said, still has the lions share of open & explorable angles. There's a huge question about how we open the real explorable, interesting angles, versus letting ourselves be sucked in to inert activities, but imo the risk of denial is worse than the risk of what is possible.
[1] https://www.edge.org/conversation/clay_shirky-gin-television...