I recall when I was in a kid during the Kennedy era, there was something called the President’s Council on Physical Fitness. Evidently , even then the government felt the need to intervene in childhood activities. However, today it is worse. I do not know what the solution is for those sad inner city minority youths whose obesity is staggering due to inactivity and too much television watching. They have no parental supervision or encouragement and their culture is often dictated by values foreign to those I and a million other Americans were brought up on. I do know that their parents ought to take responsibility for their upbringing, and not sit around waiting for Michelle Obama to get them hand outs. However, for those children who are getting too fat in suburban and rural America, there is no excuse. Parents need to reevaluate what is important in life. When I was a girl, mothers were at home so there was always watchful eyes in the neighborhood. Today, parents panic because they hear stories about kidnappings and perverts haunting neighborhoods. Although I think these incidents may occur less frequently than dramatic news programs record them as happening, it would rarely if ever happen if there were people home and active in their houses during the day. In the past,most of the family activity was centered around the home and the yard so kids preferred to be there. Schools should go back to having two recesses in addition to the after lunch play time to foster increased physical activities. I could go on and on, but one thing I think is important to repeat, more government intervention is not needed. The more your taxes go up to pay for these silly programs, the more you have to work outside your home to pay them, and the less time your child has to just be a kid.
The problem is that the left wants EVERYONE to live in the cities. The fact that cities aren’t the best place to raise a familiy never seemed to occur to the left, or more likely, they saw it as another form of enforced equality.