The risk of childhood (and adulthood) obesity.
Jane Clark, a professor of kinesiology, calls today’s crop of children “containerized kids.”
Babies and little children start life not only strapped into car seats, but fastened into high chairs for feeding, wedged into infant armchairs for watching TV, and buckled into strollers for walks and jogs around the neighborhood.
Some of this “containerizing” is necessary for safety, but it’s also making children much more sedentary. According to one study which tracked the movement of toddlers, the average 3-year-old is active for a minuscule 20 minutes a day!
As children get older, their container gets larger, but not by much; parents, who prefer the safety of the great indoors to the risk outside, functionally keep their kids under “house arrest.” Some research has shown that less than a third of American children play outside on a daily basis, while another survey found that 1 in 2 kids worldwide play outside for less than an hour a day — less time, it might be pointed out, than inmates spend outside at maximum security prisons.
While both the domestic wards and their wardens are happy — kids like staying curled up with their screens, and parents like knowing exactly where there are at all times — the more time children spend within four walls, the less time they spend moving their bodies.
Anecdotally, I can tell you that when my kids are inside, they’re much more sedentary, draping themselves over furniture and whimpering with boredom. Put outside however, it’s like the sun immediately charges up their solar-powered batteries, and they come alive with activity.
The rise in containerizing children, whether in buckled seats or relatively spacious homes, has thus unsurprisingly paralleled a rise in childhood obesity, which has more than tripled since the 1970s.
Parents often think they can counter this trend, and get the best of both physical activity and close supervision by placing their children in organized sports. Yet, ironically enough, the popularity of organized sports has expanded at the same time as children’s waistlines. Enrollment in peewee soccer does not seem to be a cure-all for keeping childhood obesity at bay.
This may be because organized sports, at least for young kids, can often be surprisingly sedentary affairs. There’s a lot of standing around being confused, punctuated with a little activity, followed with snacks and unearned Gatorade. In contrast, when kids play by themselves, in unstructured ways, in games of their own design, they actually seem to move more. I know my son Gus is a lot more active even when he’s simply shooting hoops by himself than when he’s at tee-ball practice.
While parents often think children are so full of energy their activity level will take care of itself, this is only true when artificial and unnecessary barriers to this activity are removed, and children are left to their own devices and allowed to roam and range. Stored away, all batteries corrode.
In keeping kids from the imaginary boogeymen outside, parents are blind to the silent “killer” within, which packs on pounds that children may carry with them into adulthood, and which may even eventually cut short the very life mom and dad worked so hard to preserve.
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