All the hand-wringing over child obesity is getting out of control. Maybe more kids are fat than ever before. It's a sign of prosperity. To me, some kids are going to be fat; so what?!
What is more disturbing is what some in positions of power are doing about it.
Taking the candy and soda machines out of the schools. What a joke. As if fat kids won't be fat anymore if they can't buy Mountain Dew and a Baby Ruth at school?
Passing laws against restaurants serving food with trans fats. Big Brother is alive and well and living in our big cities.
The worst idea: Removing fat children from their homes under the philosophy that the parents of fat kids are guilty of abuse and neglect. If the government can define child abuse any way they choose, what's next? Removing children from Christian homes where they are taught intolerance of homosexuals and skepticism of Darwinian Evolution? Totalitarianism.
Do we really want to find ways to solve the problem, assuming it's really a problem? How about some practical ideas -
Stop the practice of washing out kids from sports by the fifth grade. Get everybody playing their favorite sports on organized teams without slamming the door on them before they even got the chance to develop! Make active sports and games a required hour in every school day, then let everybody play on a school team that practices every afternoon. If 100 boys want to play basketball, then form 10 teams.
See, all the Big Brother policies will ever accomplish is denial of everybody's freedom to do whatever they want with their lives. We live in a society of rampant permissiveness in all areas, including raising of children. Parents don't want to do the hard parenting stuff, so they let their kids eat whatever they want, play stupid video games all day, and pretty much do whatever they please. No wonder lots of them get fat. They also fail to learn the most basic concepts of morality and civility.
So government can't fix that problem except through long-term policies that value and support those institutions that teach morality. But they can provide plenty of opportunities for kids to do active things that are fun. And if they have the courage to buck the ACLU, maybe even provide teachers and coaches who serve as strong role models for the kids while giving them outlets for healthy physical activities.
It's just one of the many issues of our age with a huge disconnect between the common-sense solutions that can work and the non-solutions proposed and implemented by the ignorant elites.
1 comment:
i think the obesity epidemic is the result of too many factors for the governmental machine to properly grasp. i'd list, in brief:
-poor quality of food preparation, due to lack of cooking ability, lack of time, and increasing dependence on "quick" foods from fast food to one-box meals.
-terror of letting kids do kid things like climb trees, run freely through a neighborhood, or ride their bikes around town. the average allowed radius for kids to roam has decreased to 1/5th of it's 1950 size.
-constant teaching that "everyone is OK" or "it's okay to be fat". for every anti-smoking ad on TV, there should be a little more than 5 anti-being-fat ads on TV. (based on the ratio of deaths from heart problems to deaths from lung problems.)
-insanely oversized portions in every restaurant. these are NOT normal-sized meals! i'm an active 205lb male, and i can't even eat half of many restaurant meals! imagine how bad they are for young kids.
-insulation of neighbors from each other - kids can't play together if they don't know other kids exist
-prohibitions against competition in schools. this includes everything from fighting to banning dodgeball.
there are certainly more, but those are the ones that are most under-addressed, in my mind.
the frustrating thing about obesity is that it's very hard to overcome once you're there. hard enough that it takes dedicated effort, 24/7, and effort that often seems unrewarded. pain of exercise, of self-denial - these things seem to hurt a person more than they help, so it's hard to continue with that harder path.
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