Shocking weight of elementary kids....

at least your school has PE.  my cousin just graduated this past may and during her last semester of student teaching she worked with (i think) 4th graders that their school had no gym, no PE, and once a month they bussed the kids to the high school for PE.  it made me so sad to hear that!!

but i am shocked to hear that so many kids are THAT much overweight.  it's crazy!

Wow. Normal weight for an 8-yo would be 50-60 pounds. So these kids would be 150+ at age 8?

I don't think I've ever seen an 8-yo that big in my 5 years as an elementary school parent. That's mind-boggling.

I had maybe 40 of the 120+ 3rd graders and of the 40 atleast 6 weighed more then 100 and 2 weighed more then 150 and 1 almost 180lbs.... 

Of the 35 4th graders I had (out of 120+) - I had 2 weighing more then 120 and 1 almost 200lbs...

these are 8 and 9 year olds! 

I'm shocked and dumbfounded about this.

I think most people are. Yet no one seems to be able to agree on what to do about it. At least in the schools, it's about money. Schools don't want to spend the money. Providing healthy food costs money. PE classes "take away" from class time, and good academic performance earns schools money. Effin' ridiculous.

Not what I said. But the point has been made every time this topic comes up on BT, that in some cases, PE and school lunch is the ONLY exercise and healthy food that some students will get. But I also know that not everyone agrees that the school should be "involved" in such a manner - though I would argue that exercise and good food choices are things that are to be taught and part of a school's job is to teach kids to be healthy intellectually, as well as emotionally and physically. All those things are intertwined.

But what do I know I don't have kids, so I couldn't possibly understand 

Of course. But that's the only panacea that has been raised in this thread. And the lack of PE is a very small part of the problem.  The parenting and the lifestyle that the children live, is the root of the problem.

that is awesome!

nl - i never assumed PE was a solution to a problem, i was just commenting on it being part of the problem.  if i never learned soccer in gym class, i would have never come home and asked my mom to put me on the soccer team.

Agreed.  PE is good, but it's not like I had it everyday even when I was little.

I think it's more about what families are eating and what the kids are doing when they are at home.

Also, the idea of these height/weight screenings at elementary schools kinda bother me.  Lots of kids get really upset about them.  And most of them aren't really in a position to do anything about it.  It just makes them feel bad.

This is a hard one for a parent.  The child(ren) are the parent's responsibility.  But we as parents cannot in this day and age (due to safety reasons) push our kids out the door and say "go play". 

My wife and I were discussing this the other day.  When we were kids, the majority of our time was spent outside with little to no parental supervision.  

Now we seemingly have pedophiles or kidnappers on every street corner.  My kids can go into our back yard or our front yard by themselves.  If they go anywhere else, myself or my wife are right there.  Correction, they do go into my neighbor's house and play with their kids.

I just deleted the other three paragraphs since I started rambling.  It boils down to:

It is the parent's responsibility.  Children need physical activity everyday.  Turn off the TV/computer and go play outside with your children.

It's not just the non-activity of these kids, but the diet they are fed at home.  Even with no activity, if they were eating healthy, they would not have this "big" of a problem. 

Just cause there is no PE at school, these kids could be running around outside when they get home.  We did not go home and watch TV or play video games all afternoon.  And Wii fit is not the answer.  It's just another video game.

I hear this all the time and I've been thinking about it.  I'm not convinced that it's true.  If you buy a bag of beans and rice, you can make a lot of pretty healthy meals for not a lot of money.  But that requires actually cooking.  If you want the convenience of not cooking, yes, it is usually cheaper to have unhealthy food.

I'm only 27. I didn't grow up in the inner city, but I also didn't grow up in a super-small town. I wouldn't say that my parents were bad parents and they were very protective of us. That being said, we used the spend the entire summer running around the development (a large one with many wooded sections) with the other neighborhood kids. We just had to tell our parents where we were going, and they told us when we needed to be back, and we'd usually go to some kid's house for lunch or whatever. What really changed? Were there less pedophiles in 1989? It wasn't THAT long ago. It's easy enough to go to a neighborhood where kids are playing - you don't need the internet to do that. If anything kids are MORE vulnerable to predators online than they are just running around outside.

My children are 6, 7, & 8 yrs old.  We live in a family friendly neighborhood three houses down from the community park.  There have been no reported cases of pedophiles or kidnappers in our area. 

I do not allow them to go to the park by themselves.  Am I over-protective?  Maybe.  But that's the way it is in my house.

A lot of that has to do with mean-world syndrome projected by the media. There really aren't more attacks...we just become much more aware of them - and much more quickly  - now than previously. Also, in the past, a lot of times kids were considered to be runaways so the possibility of kidnapping was looked into less frequently by authorities. At least that's how understand it. I could be wrong.

It does... I believe that.  Yet, even though I realize that the chances aren't as large as they might be made out to be, I still don't know that I'd let them go off like that.

I have a few years before they are to that age, of course, the perception will probably be even worse then. 

This kind of misses the point.  Its not about forcing the kid to move for 30 minutes.  In that case, you're right; it won't mitigate the problem.  However, physical education is about teaching the kid about a healthy lifestyle and how to maintain it.  They should be learning the importance of health diet and exercise.

So my parents were lousy parents?

As were all the parents back even when my parents were kids who let their kids run around town by themselves? So they were all lousy parents?

I'm pretty sure this (mean-world syndrome) has a lot to do with it.