So pity the poor children of Peterborough, denied their basic right to use jumpers for goalposts because of immigrants. Or something.

Exactly what Nigel Farage meant by suggesting that lower immigration would return us to the days of children being able to play football in the street isn’t quite clear, not least because at first he denied saying it and then – when his words were read back to him by the Today programme’s remorseless Mishal Husain – grumbled something about communities not mixing in some eastern English towns.

But putting aside the mind-boggling intellectual leap required to link outdoor play to immigration for a moment, one can’t deny his talent for identifying the tiny things that evoke big emotions; the buttons which, when pushed, trigger feelings seemingly out of all proportion to their importance. And ball games in the street is one of them.

One of the reasons we bought our current house is that when we came for a viewing we couldn’t park outside, because our end of the street had been commandeered by kids playing tennis. They downed rackets and stared at the car, as if there was something weird about wanting to actually drive on roads; and like that, I was sold.

But then our house is at the dead end of a sleepy street with barely any passing traffic. And it’s their relative lack of cars, coupled perhaps with less hysteria about paedophiles, that enabled past generations to grow up cheerfully hoofing footballs, playing out on bikes and quite possibly scrumping apples in the street. (Does anyone still scrump, incidentally? Could our children once more steal fruit freely, if only we had a Ukip target to lower immigration, not a Conservative one?)

I’m as keen on playing out, obviously, as the next parent scrabbling around desperately for Easter holiday entertainment. One of the main reasons we left London not long after becoming parents was precisely to recreate the kind of muddy, faintly feral rural childhoods my husband and I had; four years of bike rides and blackberrying, building dens and fishing for sticklebacks have duly followed. Yet every survey like the one published this week, suggesting two thirds of modern children have never made a daisy chain and half have never been on a proper picnic, is a guilty reminder to do more of this stuff because – well, everyone knows it’s a Good Thing, don’t they? It’s just that even parents with the National Trust’s list of 50 things to do before you’re 11 and three quarters firmly pinned to the fridge can’t always provide a logical explanation for precisely why it matters so much.

Small children are magnetically attracted to getting wet and filthy and chasing each other with sticks, obviously. But they’re magnetically attracted to computer games, too. And looking at the life my son and his friends build for themselves in the construction game Minecraft – trapdoors plunging enemies into pools of lava; mansions made of gold with chickens penned on the roof – even I can see the appeal of virtual worlds with their mind-blowingly infinite possibilities. Watching them tunnel their way through these fantasy landscapes of buried emeralds and rampaging monsters reminds me less of the crummy early computer games my generation had, featuring Pac-Man munching his way around in pointless circles, than of the imaginary worlds we built through books and Lego. There’s exactly the same sense of creating private spaces where children, not adults, are masters of their destiny. But still I ration Minecraft time strictly and chase visiting kids outside, without ever much questioning why.

Obviously it’s sensible for children to run and climb and kick a ball wherever possible, given alarming rates of childhood obesity. And even if the evidence increasingly suggests sugary diets are a bigger culprit than inactivity, letting off steam outside has other benefits. There are life lessons to be learned in the tiniest green space, from compassion for small squashed beetles to a healthy appetite for risk: every child should be prepared to fall out of a tree at least once, to learn that falling out of trees doesn’t kill you (mostly) and that the rewards of being up there are worth it. Kids need free, unstructured play without adults hovering – which explains why playing football in a PE lesson, with actual goalposts for goalposts, isn’t the same – and frankly adults need free, unstructured time without children bickering underfoot too.

But if it was just about these things, no sane person would give a stuff about the death of daisy chains; and we’d wax as lyrical about municipal swimming pools – or, indeed, playing football in the park – as we do about football in the street. There’s something particular about the appeal of kids playing outside their front doors in the time-honoured fashion.

If we’re honest, this hankering after jumpers-for-goalposts has a fair bit to do with the strong parental desire for our kids to do the things we did, or wish we’d done; to lead lives like the ones we lived, only better. Handing experiences down the generations is an entirely natural way of feeling close to your children, staying part of their lives.

It’s got something to do, too, with an idea of children’s place in the world; the notion of communities where everyone knows everyone and kids matter enough, even to people who aren’t their parents, to take precedence over speeding cars and complaints about noise and ruined hanging baskets. (Odd, then, that the heyday of hopscotch grids chalked on the road was also a time when children’s fears and – judging by the scale of institutionalised paedophilia now being unearthed – sometimes very real distress were more often ignored. Some golden age for kids that was).

But if you want to reconnect communities and reclaim space for play it’s roads you need to shut, not borders. It’s the boring old municipal stuff that matters: 20mph zones, temporary street closures in residential areas – where those living in a given road might agree to stopping traffic just one day a month, or even a year, and seeing if the street comes to life when every driver doesn’t insist on parking right outside their own house – and traffic-calming measures.

And yes, it’s hard to whip up an overwhelming wave of public emotion about speed bumps. But then perhaps that’s the trouble with nostalgia; in the end, quite a lot of it is bollards.