I’ve always been a sort of a mad scientist, interested and curious about most things. It seems that my son is following. However, he has much harder time than I had.

Being interested in atoms, lizards, distilling water, and fossils, he doesn’t seem to find children his age with similar interests. Not that he doesn’t have friends. He is a keen footballer, and has lots of mates. But he doesn’t find anyone who is interested in the same things he really cares about.

He is known amongst parents of his school mates, as the one who likes science, and they don’t understand how we manage to drag him off his computer games to go and watch birds, or look for insects and spiders – but honestly, it’s normally him who drags us out of bed on the weekend to go to all these activities.

Talking to the guides of these tours, the sellers in exotic pet shops (well not that exotic – but anything that is not a dog a cat or a rabbit falls into this category), and the organisers of science activities, they all come with the same message. In the last few years, kids have disappeared. They don’t go out to look for animals anymore, they are not interested in finding about where they are; they are not curious. They just want to play their computer games undisturbed.

This is really great for the parents that the kids leave them quietly alone. But is this the source pool of the next generation minds? If you are not curious as a kid, when will you start to be?