Fat Kids

Obesity.

What's really scary is how parents and schools help perpetuate it.

After all these years many parents still seem to have the idea that a chubby kid is a "healthy" kid. It's worst among poorer and/or non-white folks. Having worked in schools and now with a kid in one, I see a lot of parents beam with pride at their round little son or daughter. I think a lot see it as a testament to the world that -they- can take care of their kid. He or she's got food on the table, for sure. There's a crying need for some serious health education here.

Additional studies find the obvious connection between teevee and activity. A lot of overweight kids come from homes where the teevee is on, all the time. It's hard to convince kids that there's something better than endless teevee when mom and dad worship the tube all day and night.

This is why p.e. and recess in public schools is so critical. It's pretty much the only way a lot of kids will get introduced to physical activity.

Schools intuitively know how important this is. My kindergarten age nephew is walked around the school for fifteen minutes every morning after the first bell. The teachers find that it wakes up the sleepy kids and winds down the hyperactive ones. Which means they learn more. Other studies find that kids do learn better when given a healthy dose of physical activity (and art and music, but that's another story). Which shouldn't really be news, since most adults know you just feel a lot better after a good walk or bike ride.

Yet the mantra in education is getting kids behind desks as much as possible, and if recess and p.e. have to be short cut, then so be it. Because the kids need to -learn-. Even though they can't under those conditions.

Teachers and administrators know this in their hearts. But their heads and the mantra tell them something else. I've heard them groan about the time recess and lunch takes out of the classroom, then half an hour later groan about how whacked the kids are going to be because it's raining and they can't go outside. "Might as well show a movie, ain't nothing gonna get done this afternoon", I heard one say when I worked for the AmeriCorps tutoring program in the Oakland schools. But ask her opinion about physical activity any other time, and she'd complain about the time it took.

Any serious talk about school reform has got to include a demand for structured and unstructured physical activity. Kids need it as much as they need light and air. Best of all, it's cheaper in the long run because we'll have healthier people all around.

This is another reason we need a national health insurance program. If the public sector were footing our hospital bills it would have a reason to start connecting the dots here and require a serious physical activity regimen in our schools.