What's the Epidemic?

This week’s blog really does not have anything to do with being a North Dakota farm girl except for the fact when I was younger, I do not remember a day where I would not have some sort of physical activity. This is about the youth of today, the thoughts being brought about of how much less active children are. After watching state wrestling this weekend, I began to think of the overweight students who do not participate in sports, I then decided to do some research. There is some really startling information that I found.

According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, since 1970, the fraction of children that are overweight has nearly quadrupled among 6 to 11 year olds and more than doubled among 12 to 19 year olds. These are very disturbing numbers. Could you imagine what these numbers will be like in 20 even 30 years if they keep going at this rate? What has changed to make this happen besides the typical response of video games? The same site also stated, “One possible contributing factor to the rise in youth overweight is decreased physical education (PE) in schools. For example, the percentage of high school students enrolled in daily PE classes fell from 42% to 28% between 1991 and 2003.

Fox News also did a report on physical education in schools. They found that most school PE was an elective and not required. They also found that if it was required there was no required amount of time to be active.

Nancy Brown, CEO of the American Heart Association, put it best on what we are trying to encourage. “The increasing number of exemptions and waivers — some for personal reasons, others because a child participates in another activity, like band — may hurt the schools' ability to teach children how to be healthy. PE doesn't have to be "calisthenics, mindless exercise and contests that favored the most athletic kids," but can be tailored to all types of children.”

To me these numbers are startling. Some say it's because of America and how we are that the youth is now mainly obese. What can we do to change this? In North Dakota we sometimes feel as if we are immune to many things that happen throughout the country. This obesity issue however is not one of them, what happened to goo old fashioned PE? Where when it was nice out students would beg the teacher to go outside and play kickball. Today there seems to be no begging to be active, which is being blamed on the schools like in the facts I found above, but really is it the schools fault, or should parents be pushing their children to make better decisions and get out and really play actively?