British children are losing contact with nature at a “dramatic” rate, and their health and education are suffering, a National Trust report says. Traffic, the lure of video screens and parental anxieties are conspiring to keep children indoors, it says, resulting in a “nature deficit disorder”.

Evidence suggests the problem is worse in the U.K. than other parts of Europe, and may help explain poor U.K. rankings in childhood satisfaction surveys. The trust argues, as have other bodies in previous years, that the growing dissociation of children from the natural world and internment in the “cotton wool culture” of indoor parental guidance impairs their capacity to learn through experience.