I always have dirt under my fingernails. Regardless of their length, or my recent activities, they are always filthy. I blame this on two decades of not giving a shit. I grew up running around barefoot and peeing behind the tree in my backyard. Nowadays, I roll around in the grass in Washington Square Park, sink my hands into the dirt of my potted plants, and dig for sand crabs at the beach whenever I manage to escape for the weekend.

I only notice my nails when other people point them out. By other people, I mostly mean my roommate who has, on multiple occasions, tried to coerce me into getting a manicure. Every now and then she is successful, and I have beautiful nails for about 20 minutes until I, as is inevitable, chip them.

Having dirty nails and skinned knees is something normal to me, a byproduct of many days spent running around getting into trouble. An experience that, it seems, is going in the same direction as Furbies and frosted tips.

While walking with my dad a few months ago, we talked about how our town is no longer filled with the noise of children playing on sunny Saturday afternoons. With an elementary school within walking distance and dozens of families with young children, we were perplexed. The only answers we could find were that children are either choosing not to go outside, or their parents aren’t compelling them to do so.

I don’t put much merit in the “children choosing to stay inside” argument as I, a hard-headed child myself, would have often preferred to stay inside and watch movies, but my parents didn’t let me. Going outside wasn’t a choice. So I’m left with the idea that parents, most likely trying to protect their children, don’t encourage them to play outside in the manner I once did.

This worries me. Some of my most formative moments came from bumped elbows and stubbed toes, the unavoidable results of tree climbing, fort building, and roughhousing. Children are being deprived of these experiences, a sensory deficiency that may well manifest itself through the child’s life. Resiliency, one of the best lessons taught by hard falls, is in high demand but seems to be in ever shortening supply.

Some parents are pushing back by home schooling or unschooling their kids, taking them out of traditional educational systems and empowering them to learn through doing. But this movement is too radical and, for many working families impractical, to spread very far. So what can we do?

Tech, it could be said, has gotten us into this mess. I like to think that there are opportunities for it to also get us out. New technologies could, when used correctly, empower parents to lengthen the leash. A simple cell phone gives your child the ability to call home if they need help. Tablets let them look up that crazy bug that they found under a log, adding educational opportunities to digging for grubs. There’s no shortage of use cases for making technology a freedom giving resource, rather than a freedom-sucking leech.

Medical and health companies are also joining the game. A new device called Fever Smart could help parents of children with less-than-perfect health feel more comfortable giving their son or daughter larger amounts of autonomy. By monitoring a child’s core body temperature, and notifying their guardian if it spikes or dips dramatically, Fever Smart gives a whole new meaning to keeping a tab on it.

It may seem like a strange image. Kids with temperature reading devices, tablets, and cell phones instead of a magnifying glass, bug jars, and bird books, but I think that it is quite possibly a move in the right direction. Chastising parents for not getting their kids outdoors doesn’t do much if you don’t give them the tools and resources that would make them comfortable doing so.

So bring on the tech. Kids will still get bruised ribs, scratched legs, and learn a whole lot of lessons, whether there is a pen and paper or an iPhone stuffed in their back pocket.

NOTE: Fever Smart co-founder Aaron Goldstein is currently finalist for Entrepreneur Magazine’s 2014 College Entrepreneur of the Year. You can vote for him here.  

We become adapted to the lack of use of our basic (human) resources and they respond by becoming unfamiliar to us. – Alexis Carrel, Nobel Prize Recipient 1912