A concrete jungle. Parks few and far in between. Dusty roads, pavements occupied by vehicles, construction materials and footpath vendors. Choking air pollution. Motorcycles zooming all around. A place full of strangers.

Kathmandu is no place to grow up.

When I struggle to engage my four-year-old daughter on her days off from school, I am constantly reminded of my own early days, growing up in the hills. There we had fields as far away as you could see. Fruits to pick all around, trees to climb and to swing from everywhere. Everyone in the neighbourhood, a familiar face. No young soul without serious business confined to their room or home, except when it was dark. Playing football of fallen limes. Twigs, logs, sacks, rings, all playthings. Frolicking with friends, running after calves, chasing monkeys and jackals in the woods. What more to ask for in life as long as you did not go hungry or thirsty and had some clothes to wear.

Children in villages grow in the lap of nature. They know how the soil smells when the field is freshly dug or when it rains. They know how the bamboos whistle in the wind, how the dove coos, when glow worms fly, and what a wasp sting feels like.

For their city counterparts, vegetables are found in shops. The butcher produces all kinds of meat. Milk comes in pouches. They don’t know which is bigger: cow or buffalo! All reality is virtual and mediated. Book is the source of all knowledge. Tablet becomes the playground.

For people of modest or little means like me, who have come in search of opportunities, rearing a child is a nightmare in the city. There is no granny to give the baby an oil massage. Many tiny tots have no bigger brothers or sisters to teach them how to brush or how to flush. You cannot even really let the child out: she may be run over on the street; he might be picked up by crooks.

Kathmandu feels so insecure, most houses have walls for fences, leaving no space unclaimed except for what the road retains. This encroachment of what could have been stretches of open space also limits people’s mental horizons. Tenants, in particular, feel they don’t belong to where they have come to live. Probably children too feel squeezed amid the compartmentalised neighbourhoods.

So you have to ask them to cycle on the rooftop, play ball in the corridors. Their nursery schools, save a few, have no playgrounds. They have nowhere to run or to stray. They have no lawns for sunbathing. And when TV becomes their best companion, it is of little wonder that thick spectacles have become a uniform of sorts for little ones.

Back in villages, we took our own risks and faced our own problems. We climbed up trees that we could not climb down. We jumped down rows of terraced fields until our feet ached.

We were often caught in the middle when we could not weigh down standing bamboo. Children spent whole days swimming in unfamiliar waters. Some were sent to the jungle alone to graze cattle. We hardly gauged the dangers of silly acts of adventure like rolling stones down cliffs, getting oxen to fight on slippery slopes. We might have been gored by bullocks but that is how we grew up into “confident” men and women, in our own right. That we could not entirely focus on studies was something very few bothered about.

Here in Kathmandu Valley, dust has been such a problem in the last few years that you cannot take your baby out on a public vehicle for an hour. If you do, they develop a breathing problem in the evening.

This spell of passive growth has a huge bearing on children’s physical well-being and mental and emotional growth. Some talk and act like cartoon characters, as a result of constantly watching all sorts of animations available on channels and online. Misunderstanding with parents builds early on. Trivial matters are enough to irritate our budding generation.

Why can’t there be parks for children at manageable distances, safe lanes for cycling, ramps to skate on, open spaces to gather and chat and play for hours? What do we want them to grow up into without providing them with facilities suitable to foster their development?

Well-to-do families have managed to fill this gap by sending their children to well-facilitated boarding schools where they can indulge in most sports, martial arts, do athletics, practice music and engage in other creative pursuits. Some may be joining cricket academies to practise during the weekends. A few may be chauffeured to facilities for routine sessions. But the majority have no way out. Most parents are having to regret their inability to provide the new generation with the space and care they require and deserve. And individuals are not to be blamed for their failures if they made the minimum effort expected of them. It reflects poorly on our society and nation as a whole if its citizens are helpless.

Isn’t it time the state widened its social security net to include children’s concerns? Just like free immunisation, should not there be common platforms for our little ones to grow up healthy and sound? They say that a morning shows the day. With our cloistered communities and sore-eyed, bored children, what new dawn are we heralding?