Which scenario should provoke more panic: the possibility that your child might become one of the approximately 100 children who are kidnapped by strangers each year, or one of the country's 58 million overweight adults?
In 1972, 87 percent of children who lived within a mile of school walked or biked daily; today, just 13 percent of children get to school under their own power, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In a significant parallel, before 1980, only 5 percent of children were obese; today that figure has tripled, says the CDC.
Our hyper-anxiety about the safety of children is creating a society in which any outdoor activity that doesn't take place under the supervision of a coach or a "psychomotor activities" mandate from the state is too risky to attempt.
What do you think?
4 comments:
I agree 100%.
In our fervor to protect our kids, we're not only denying them the lessons that come with failure, we're creating a generation of couch potatoes.
I believe that ADHD is a legitimate medical diagnosis. But I also believe that many of the behavioral disorders we see in children these days are not intrinsic medical problems - instead, they are "syndromes" that are too loosely applied as an excuse for bad behavior and a convenient panacea for bad parenting.
No one wants to see their child get injured, but I'd submit that it hasn't really been a childhood if you haven't gotten stitches or a cast at some point.
I ate mud pies. I swam in overflowing ditches. I rode my bike across half the parish. I fought with my schoolmates, and we settled our disputes with fisticuffs instead of weapons.
And yet I survived that horribly unstructured childhood. Heck, my immune system is so well developed now that it's been known to attack squirrels in the back yard.
I agree with Ambulance Driver!
Another eater of mud pies! And did you also lie in the drained drainage ditch and marvel at the architectural genius of crawdads?
Give a girl one doll, some colored pencils and paper, great books and music and lots of space to explore and develop an imagination. And when she's able to recognize a con artist, put her on a bicycle.
Thanks for discussing my article on your blog, Bob. If you could do me a big favor -- also include a hyperlink to my website, http://www.ljwilliamson.com. Thanks again.
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