"I do get a little nauseous, but I just close my eyes for a couple of minutes."

This isn’t the voice of Toronto Maple Leafs coach Ron Wilson describing his team’s defensive play last season, but a 12-year-old athlete describing trying to do her homework in the car between activities, a situation the CTV documentary "Lost Adventures in Childhood" says is far too common.

The documentary is available at the Exeter Library and intersplices film from the 1960s and ’70s of kids playing baseball in the park and biking freely with evidence from a variety of childhood experts, who say evidence is growing that children are being damaged by their inability to escape their parents’ eye.

One of the speakers is author Carl Honore, who spent two years researching kids playing around the world and said what is driving the close supervision is "fear feeding itself," despite statistics that say the world is safer than ever for children.

With the documentary saying children are spending 90 per cent of their time indoors, Honore noted "unstructured play is nature’s way of making kids learn skills such as being creative, conflict resolution and other emotional skills. If parents are there, these skills don’t develop."

The opinion is something now been backed by laboratory science, said researcher Sergio Pellis from the University of Lethbridge, who did experiments on young rats playing with and without adult rats present and said "play leads directly to maturation of the brain."

He added not being allowed time on their own can lead to "social incompetence … survival is about adaptability and that’s what play is."

Another speaker in the film was evolutionary psychologist Don Fulgosi, who noted kids not allowed to play freely may not be socialized properly and are at risk for a wide variety of problems such as aggression, anxiety and depression.

Youth sports consultant Elaine Raakman noted that children involved in highly organized activities show a lack of initiative and are unable to function without being told what to do. "They need step by step instruction," said Raakman.

The close supervision is damaging not just to kids but to society as a whole, said Psychology Today editor Hara Estroff Marano, since electronic monitoring destroys the bond of trust between children and parents, which is the basis of trust in a society.

After all the evidence presented by the experts though, what is the most damaging are comments from children themselves.

Despite being products of an era which has lavished more time, attention and money on them, in the end what they want most of all is to stay home, as shown by comments such as, "I only got to rest once a week," and "even on weekends I don’t get to rest."

It appears the generation of parents who ended the ‘seen and not heard’ method of raising kids is actually neither seeing, nor hearing what their kids actually want.