WHY SAFE KIDS ARE BECOMING FAT KIDS*America has stripped all the fun out of playtime,...

ncpa.org ^ | August 14, 2008

[InvisibleChurch]

All the safety measures we have taken to protect our children have produced such harmful effects as increasing the rate of childhood obesity; in fact, one in six children in America is obese, and many of them face a lifetime of chronic illness, says the Center for Disease Control. However, the situation could cure itself if children would just get off the sofa!

But how do we lure children outside? One key attraction is risk, says Philip Howard, chairman of Common Good. Risk is fun, he continues, at least the moderate risks that were common in prior generations. Today, America has stripped all the fun out of playtime:

There is nothing left in playgrounds that would attract the interest of a child over the age of four. Exercise in schools is carefully programmed, when it exists at all. Some schools have even banned tag and running at recess! Little Leagues forbid sliding into base, some towns ban sledding and high diving boards are history. Safety is important, says Howard, but do the resulting trade-offs, such as the increase in childhood obesity, make sense? There is one solution, he adds, someone on behalf of society should be authorized to make these choices, and the courts must honor those decisions. Otherwise, the pious accusation of safety fanatics will guarantee a cultural spiral downwards toward the lowest common denominator.

For America's children, that means spending more than six hours per day staring at a screen, Howard concludes. Is that the way we want our children to grow up?

Source: Philip K. Howard, "Why Safe Kids Are Becoming Fat Kids," Wall Street Journal, August 13, 2008.

For text:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121858701285435131.html

For more on Health Issues:

http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_Category=16

[panthermom]

my daughter is paranoid that she will be accused of abuse

LOL!! I've often felt the same way. When my son was in the 1st grade he had fallen off of his bike and had a big scrape on his cheek. Over the weekend he was riding a bike in the woods and fell and got a huge scratch down his back from a pine cone and to end the week, he took a baseball to the face that ripped the scab off of the scrape on his cheek and blackened his eye. His teacher, who was a rookie was horrified, she took him to the nurse and she laughed. She had my other two boys previously.

[panthermom]

We used to have metal swings that were flat and they had hard rubber around the edge. If you got hit with the swing, you took a shot. Our swings were right on the beach and we’d keep track of how far you jumped by the prints you left in the sand.

[mplsconservative]

Right on the beach, I’m jealous. :)

We jumped into grass and had green-stained heels and knees. My mom was often none-too-happy with the grass stains on the homemade culotte sets she had sewn me. I was a fashionista, that with the cat-eye glasses and all. LOL

[zeugma]

My questions: (1) any bone sticking out? (2) blood in spurts? (3) anybody unconscious/nonresponsive? If the answers to all those are "no," ride on!

LOL. Me too.  My motto was/is  "if you ain't bleeding, you ain't hurt". Kinds are mostly made of rubber anyway. I don't understand how freaked out people are today about kids. I had about a 20 mile radius from home where you could find me on weekends when I wasn't working (child labor laws don't apply to family members). I grew up in Clear Lake, south of Houston, and would regularly ride 50-60 miles in a day during the summer while it was 100° and 100% humidity.

These days, that would kill me :-)

[Mobile Vulgus]

“Safest” kid in America? Michael Moore.

[driftless2]

"mom's yell"

Boy, that sure brings back memories. Talk about dating yourself. I too remember many summer evenings when I'd either hear a parent calling me or a friend telling me my parents were calling me. I wonder when that custom stopped?

[driftless2]

"brother's wife"

My wife has two daughters from her first marriage. Both daughters have husbands who never played sports when they were young. The daughters have now started having kids, and I will definitely have my step-grand kids (?) playing sports at our house when they're old enough. No play-stations or X-Boxes will be allowed.

[panthermom]

My kids have all of the video game stuff, Xbox, Playstion and PSP, they also have access to the computer and tv. Even if there is nobody around my son will Ripstick, shoot hoops or set up the baseball net and hit baseballs or he and his brothers will go out and do something.

I have never had to limit their video game or computer time, they just aren’t that interested.

[panthermom]

Every summer in my neighborhood we’d have our own Olympics. We’d set the whole thing up and practice and then have the parent’s come and watch.

We’d fight all the time and then make up. Parents never got involved.

[LottieDah]

“...Kids could just ride bikes and explore the neighborhood, go to friends houses, etc. without having the parents have to make a play date.

“Nowadays, parents want their kids supervised at all times, and don’t let them have the freedom that previous generations of kids did to go outside and play.”

In many large cities kids can’t go outside to play thanks to the perverts and gang-bangers shooting like they are at an Afghani wedding. Unfortunately some parents are unwilling or unable to supervise their kids plaing outside. It is a shame.

[AnAmericanMother]

Mom's yell . . .

My dad had a conch horn from the West Indies with the point cut off and filed smooth.

You could hear that darned thing for MILES, and it was certainly unique. Another of our neighbors had a big old bell that they rang when they wanted the kids in, and that was unique too!

(I've still got the conch - but now I call the kids on their cell phones . . . :-( )

[AnAmericanMother]

Depends on the cave.

Daughter and her high school caving club went to Pettijohn's Cave, which is said to be "the muddiest cave in the Eastern United States." Judging from the state of her clothes when she returned, I have to agree!

I don't do caves well because I'm claustrophobic . . . have never minded heights, clean our gutters from on top of the roof, breezed through the BSA High Ropes Course without a care in the world, but something about being in a narrow crack a couple hundred feet under the ground with all that rock right over my head . . . . < shiver >

[Malacoda]

Ah, the old "Bun-burner Deluxe" model!

In our neighborhood, it's amazing the number of really big, perfectly manicured lawns that have really expensive play sets on them....that MUST be for show, because there are never kids on them. I swear, the neighborhood kids are raised like little veals.

I toss my kids out in the yard at 8:30 AM. They can come in for potty breaks and lunch, and after lunch, we head to the pool. After dinner is reserved for firefly hunting and flashlight tag.

I had a mother aghast at the fact that the kids had a few mosquito bites and a bit of a tan. "West Nile! she shrieked. "Skin cancer!" If the bathwater isn't muddy, and each day isn't ended slightly sunburned, minorly bug-bitten and exhausted, it wasn't a proper summer day.

[Labyrinthos]

We played army, kill the guy with the ball, sandlot football (no pads), cow field baseball (with cows), and demolition derby (on sleds). We made gravity powered go-carts and tree forts, and we broke things on purpose and then tried to fix them. This was in the late 60’s/early 70’s, and we did all this without our parents’ direct supervision. (Most of the time we didn’t even have indirect supervision.) The world was no safer then, than now, and yet our parents allowed us to roam the neighborhood and beyond at will from sun-up to sun-down, as long as we were home for lunch at noon and dinner at 5:15 pm.

[reagan_fanatic]

When I was a kid in the late sixties and early seventies, we played on things like this:


And this


and this



We had these things that looked like huge metal slides tilted on their sides. There was a metal rail along the top, and you climbed to the top using that rail. Kids by the millions played on this so-called 'dangerous' equipment and very few of them got hurt. Now they're gone. All gone. All gone in the name of 'safety'. The safety nazis have effectively neutered the playground and ruined them for generations of kids. How sad that today's kids will never know the enjoyment and thrills we had on our old playgrounds.

[Axeslinger]

It hasn’t stopped. My teen has been trained for years to listen for the sound of my whistle (MUCH louder than a yell!!). My almost 6 y.o. is “in training” to listen for the sound of my whistle.

[panthermom]

I have encouraged that with my kids. Fortunately in my neighborhood the parents are fine with that stuff too. Some of the contraptions they have made are frightening others really good.

[semantic]

Ain't no fat kids in this group. Check out the requirements just to get in:

Open to boys and girls ages 9 through 17. Applicants must possess a basic swimming ability to be able to pass the following prerequisite exam:

o Swim 100 yards in less than 1 minute & 50 seconds
o Tread water or five minutes
o Swim underwater for approximately 10 yards

[EBH]

I work in a place that provides those summer camps for the local kids. The kids are supervised all day. Even if they go to the restroom an adult must be escorting them to and fro! Even the ‘nature camps’ don’t allow for the expenditure of energy & adventure that a bit of off trail hiking would provide.

They go home at night! Yeah!

But, but, one little girl who is the daughter of the director of the camps is sent away to camp(s) nearly every week of summer. In a huge way, I feel sorry for this little girl. She doesn’t get the chance to develop local childhood friendships, her big sister leaves for college next week and they have not spent any time together. She is a lovely child, well mannered and all but appears very shy to me.

It seems to me in a lot of cases the camps are just oversized daycare centers for older kids.

[Drawsing]

We had about 25 kids in my class at public school back in the 60s and there was always just one chubby kid. It was like a requirement that every class had to have one. Now in my son’s class of 16 in a private school there are five fat kids. You should see what their mothers put in those kid’s lunches. One mother drives to school every day to deliver her son his daily Mcdonalds or Chick Fil-A fast food with dessert.