Shocking weight of elementary kids.... (Page 2)

From my experience more and more of the parents of todays kids grew up with little activity in their lives.  As a result, their kids are having even less activity in their lives.

For example, some friends of mine have a son who is now 14.  Two or three years ago they were over at our place with some other people on a beautiful spring day.  Another friend of mine mentioned we should really go outside and toss a baseball around on a day like today (we're both in our 30s).

So I pulled out four gloves and a ball and we went outside.  It was that day I realized that my friends son had NEVER been shown how to throw a ball.  I was shocked.  He understood the concept of throwing, and could throw, but he had never been shown how to throw properly.

I was watching this thinking to myself, "my friend played football all through highschool and he never taught his son how to throw a baseball."  It made me pretty sad and I was kinda pissed too.  In my mind it set his kid up for all kinds of issues.

Later when I asked him about it he said, "Well he never expressed any interest in it."

I think this is where so many parents have gone wrong.  How are kids going to express interest in something they never have experienced?   Further, in this case, he's never going to "express an interest" now because he's embrassed as hell that he can't throw a ball!

So I guess to me it's no wonder that kids are crazily overweight. 

I am an Elementary PE teacher and I see kids either 1 or 2 days a week for 30 or 40 minutes.  I do not teach Health and nutrition.  That is part of the science curriculum.  I do discuss it quite often though.  I don't even have time to teach basic skills!  Most kids in my school do not play sports for economic reasons.  I am pushing for more time per week but it is up to the school district.  My class is very active during the time I have them.  They come in moving (locomotors)  then we do a workout of the day.  Usually 3 sets of different strength and cardio stations and then a skill lesson.  We are doing volleyball right now.  I have 24 kids average per class and I still cannot meet all their needs in that amount of time!

Actually, it IS true.  A box of mac and cheese or ramen noodles is a lot less expensive and less time consuming to prepare than fresh produce and meat. 

I am not arguing that a healthy, well-balanced meal has to be expensive.  However, many low income families do not have the resources available (knowledge or time) to make this happen. 

Cheap shot.

I was largely self parented when I was young but I don't consider my parents to be lousy parents.  In fact, I consider them to be great parents.  I was able to experience a degree of freedom most of my peers never dreamed of and I thrived in it.

Then again as I think about all the things that could have (and sometimes did) go wrong as a result of the experience I am sometimes amazed I survived my pre-teen years.

Take it from another angle, were all those parents that allowed their kids to ride and skate around without helmets fifteen years ago lousy parents?  Are the ones who allow it today lousy parents?  I don't think I could say so in either case.

For me as a parent it is more about what level of risk I can live with.  At what point, if something were to happen, can I look at myself in the mirror the next day and say, "I did everything I was supposed to do."  For a parent that is probably the most significant question.  If you do what you think is reasonable and your kid still gets hurt or, god forbid, killed, can you look at yourself in the mirror and say "I can live with myself."

If, on the other hand, you have a significant degree of discomfort with a situation but you allow it to happen anyway and your kid gets hurt.  Well, that's a degree of emotional scarring I'm not willing to live with.

Does that mean I think that people who have higher or lower risk tollerences then me are "lousy parents"?  Nope.  They just do it differently.

Sure they should. But if you think that the majority of things that children learn come from the school systems, you are sadly mistaken. They learn more about diet and exercise and develop long-term patterns from home, not from school.

That's really cool they haven't yanked PE out of your schools.

And I didn't mean to imply that PE teachers should be teaching ALL of that.  I just meant that its a valuable resource that should be incorporated into any school cirriculum to help teach all of that good stuff.

Twas my point. I don't think my parents were lousy either. If they'd kept us cooped up in the house and never let us go outside for fear of "bad things" happening, I'd be WAY more screwed up. I have SEEN parents who've coddled their children into being anxious and neurotic by the age of 5 or 6. That's not right, IMHO. My parents were quite strict with us, believe me. But they also just let us be kids, most of the time.

I didn't argue that produce and meat are expensive.  However, things like lentils, rice, and beans are all healthy and CHEAPER than things like mac and cheese and ramen.  

I never said anything about you or your parents.  I was discussing me and my family.

I never said they didn't.  I only said that schools should provide the knowledge necessary to lead a healthy lifestyle. 

And you'd be surprised at the stuff kids bring home to their parents.

True.  But I wouldn't eat that stuff.

Just for a little sunshine on this topic.  I went to the park the other day for my wife's softball game and was so happy to see hundreds of very fit kids running and playing soccer in what appeared to be some sort of after school camp.  Literally there must have been 8 or 9 fields full of teams practicing and none of them were close to over weight.

That being said my nephew (wife's sister's kid) is 11 yo, 4'7" maybe and is 200+  his brother who is 14 or 15 is 5'5" and probably 220.  Mom is obese and dad is obese.  All I hear from them is, "We live in AZ and it is too hot to go outside."  I always say, don't sleep in til 9 or 10 in the morning and it is cool enough to get out and play.   They also have a really nice rec center near them.  The older boy did lose about 30 lbs last year through marching band, but decided not to do that anymore because it is too much work.

I understand where you are comming from.  I just think it cheapens the discussion to accuse someone of calling people, "Lousy parents" just because they might have a different risk threshold.

My daughter isn't 4 yet and I'm still deciding how I'm going to handle the particular situation KenD mentioned.  I know I won't be as lax as my parents were but I hope I won't be as protective as some of my friends parents were.  The issue is that every parent has to make that choice, and I think its a damned hard one to make.

As a parent, no matter what choice you make someone is going to think you are too permissive and someone is going to think you are too harsh.  So, in my mind, you may as well pick something you can live with because most people are going to have an opinion about how your doing it wrong.

x2.  There is no way my 7,5 and 4 year olds will go out to the park right down the street to play by themselves.  (you know how Navy housing can be ) IMO, one can never be too careful about your kids safety.  However, I try to make it a point to go out with the kids and make sure they play until they are worn out.   It's too bad that other parents don't have the chance or don't make the time to do it. 

I was a morbidly obese kid.  I have no idea how much I weighed but at just over 200 lbs, I suspect I now weigh about what I did in the 6th grade.  I was a fairly active kid.  I had a bike and I remember liking it, I would play at the public pool during summer after walking there myself (was about a mile away).  I would run around with the kids.  My mom dragged me from doctor to doctor to nutritionist to whoever else that might help but my weight kept going up and up.  My mom wasn't into convenience foods and we never really ate packaged foods.   Of course obese kids weren't the norm 20 years ago so I was kind of unique.

A lot of it does have to do with the tools of providing healthy food for kids and helping parents achieve that goal.  

I'd also say that there are active kids around, I see them when I go swimming.  You see kids playing soccer on the weekends and practicing on the week days at the many soccer fields.  You even just see kids at the park.   My neighbors will have their kids ride their bikes and play outside while they supervise them.  I've even been known to join in with the kids to play ball or something similar.  

 Overall though I think there are many factors to the obesity dilemma.  Adult obesity is growing rapidly, there is no reason to expect that childhood obesity wouldn't as well.  Its the reason that 'type 2' diabetes is called what it is because it used to be consider adult onset but its now common in kids. 

x2. Neither of my parents were very active growing up. My mom was painfully shy and unathletic, and my father was a fat teenager. Neither of them came from athletic families. However, they PLAYED with us, took us to the park, the beach, took us sledding in the winter, bought us bikes, put us in dance classes and swim lessons, or sports if we wanted (never forced, but very much encouraged). We had a furnished basement to play in, and we basically stayed outside all summer long and often in the winter too, until it got dark. Although I never played organized sports, I swam and rode my bike and rollerskated, and I danced for years. I think the most important thing is that they were always interested in what we did and supported us in what we did. That's the key thing. You don't pay any attention to your kids, they don't end up doing much with themselves.

I like to separate dance from 'sports' only because I didn't see it as a "sport" as a kid. I wish my parents had made me join the swim team too, along with my sis. But I was already taking 3 dance classes a week, as well as piano lessons, so I would had to have quit dance, which I didn't want to do.

That was basically what kept me from sports as a teen - I was already into the drama club, etc and that was all after school mostly every day, so no time for a lot of sports that also practiced after school. I was urged to try out for the track team by our gym coach - didn't do it cuz I wanted to do the musicals instead.

It is an issue, but I would be very cautious in seeing PE classes as an answer.  I had such miserable experiences in PE throughout my elementary and high school years that I chose a college in part on the LACK of a PE requirement, and in fact there were no PE classes even offered.  I started running and did Tae Kwan Do in college, but was still pretty averse to the idea of exercise and sports such that I did not really become active again until my 30's.

Unless PE has changed a lot, we mostly were given very little instruction (and as a nerdy kid with little innate ability or interest, handing me a basketball with the instructions "Play basketball you guys" really did not qualify) or support (e.g. running laps with no idea of how to pace myself or what constituted something like good form) and I was more turned off of exercise than turned on to it.  That 30 minutes was never going to translate into a more active lifestyle.

Income might be an excuse to not get enough nutrition, but it's not an excuse to eat like crap.  Go to Aldi and see how many cans of veggies you can pick up for $5

My senior year of college I was too poor even for ramen.  I ate a TON of rice, and yes it is dirt cheap and easy to make.  Seriously, dump a few cups with some water in a pot, cover and let simmer for a while.....  It's actually easier then making mac and cheese.  Add a little chicken or beef bouillon for variety.  With a little more effort, you can make enough spaghetti and marrinara to feed yourself for a week for under $10.  That's less then what you'd spend for 2 lunches at McD's.

Meat is also pretty cheap (but does require a little more work) if you buy it in bulk.  A little while ago, I bought 12 lbs of various pork products (some chops...bone-in and butterfly, a tenderloin, a roast.... the good parts of the pig) for like 8 bucks.  When I got home, we split it up and froze it.  That was dinner (with rice..oddly enough) for at least 6 days.   $8 for 2 people for 6 days = 66 cents per person per day (for good sizeportions).... 

I have plenty of theories as to what the root of the problem is, but unfortunately I think it's just the direction our society is turning.  If people aren't willing to accept the fact that their choosing to eat bad is what is making them fat (instead it's the fast food joint's fault for serving fatty food), then how can we expect them to make a proactive change?  It's just easier to blame someone else so it becomes out of your control.

Yup. We are a culture of blame and selfishness. We should all be able to have everything we want, and there is no accountability for anything these days. It's always someone else's fault.