Childhood 'poisoned' by modern life

[Enid]

junk food and no exercise is 'poisoning' childhood

Surely all these depressed/obese kids are an urban myth?

My take on it is that there have always been fat kids and stupid people, whats new?

Are the people that signed this letter living in a bubble of nostalgia?

My LO doesn't show any signs of TV stifling creativity - she'll watch programmes on tv, such as the evacuee programme & then for a while will play at being an evacuee. She used to watch this road safety video & afterwards get her dolls & pram & renact bits in the video but also add her own scenarios in. It was really entertaining to observe.

She enjoys going on long "adventures" (aka longish walks) to the woods with us & then makes up stories as we're going round, such as "we're lost & we need to find our way back." Also the garden becomes many things in her games & she loves to be outside kicking a ball, running around or even helping with the gardening. Sometimes she even writes about her adventures.

Her favourite computer game is Sims which is almost like a modernised version of her dollshouse, except she has to learn to budget.

I don't agree that it's modern life that's totallty to blame. It's not that hard to get a balance of many different activities, including fun ways to get exercise. Also I'm sure that there is a greater range of fresh fruit and veg than when I was a child.

its rotten now being a kid

we played out cos there was not much else to do (no computers) and it was safe to go anywhere then (in 70's)so we went all over the place

no junk food as did not exist.meat and two veg in our house and fish and chips on fridays!

tv was better too.i cant believe the stuff thats on for them these days.Its so adult and full of bad language.

ugh

wish it was 1973

I agree with the people who reckon that kids get a balance of lots of different activities these days. Our garden is rubbish for young kids (most of it is at the front), but with neither of our kids being at school yet I take them somewhere every day to be active, as they have such high energy levels which they need to burn off during the day in order to behave more calmly later in the day, when they can play independently, be read to, draw or watch tv.

We have to drive to activities, only 5-10 min drives, to parks, soft play etc. In bad weather I think soft play is great - kids don't always mind getting wet but parents often do! Soft play can be expensive however if you have more than 1 child (they ought to do 2nd & subsequent child discounts but none of ours do!), by the time you've bought drinks and snacks for 2 plus coffee for mum it can be nearly £10, or nearly £15 if you have lunch there (which is a lovely break from the preparation and mess at home tho!). Some of our local playgyms really ought to get rid of their sweetie machines and useless cheapo nasty toys-in-a-clear-ball dispensing machines, though!! I will admit mine do eat some crisps, sweets and choc and the occasional fruitshoot and macdonalds. We don't ban the junk but let them have it so they become bored of it and eventually cut down on it by themselves, so it doesn't become 'forbidden fruit' and thus highly desirable to them.

DD is 18 months and wants to walk everywhere, which I want her to keep doing as she gets older. DH and I like a decent walk at the weekend and we let the kids walk then go in the pushchair or carrier if they get tired.

So I think it is up to parents to take kids out to be active and safe these days, not leave them to their own devices to play on computers all the time, even as they get older - while they are not old enough to go out independently, the parents still need to take them to parks etc to encourage them to be active, this shouldn't just be for pre-school-age children, IMO.

Chocpeanut, but there were no soft play centres in 1973! Kids seem to have a whale of a time in those! I wish I could have gone to them!

We had home-cooked food but occasionally had fish fingers or sausages and beans with (home made) chips. DH's memory of being little is hating the food they had - also meat and two veg, salad, and fish and chips from the chippie. DH's dad didn't consider sausages or fish fingers proper food (well he was right, but how many small children can eat proper meat, they find it too chewy). That's why mine eat a lot of fish and pasta, I won't have chicken nuggets or burgers in the house (and DS declares he doesn't like them anyway!). But 'foreign' food like curry, pasta and chinese was also not considered proper food by DH's dad! Whereas my mum encouraged a taste for it and cooked her own once or twice a week.

Also, children now seem to be encouraged to eat far more fruit than we had. I remember lots of veg but not much fruit (and most kids prefer fruit to veg). No fruit was provided at school, nor were kids allowed or encouraged to have water on their desks or in bags - I remember not drinking for hours at school, just getting a few sips out of the water fountain. I must have been terribly dehydrated!

God this is going to come across as really smug, it's not meant to be, honest. I just wanted to post a bit of a comparison, because based on what I read here on mumsnet, I find the average childhood experiences between UK & Switzerland, where we now live & where my children have been brought up to be enormous.

My eldest son started school a few weeks ago, aged 7. He goes 5 mornings and 2 afternoons a week.
School dinners don't exist. Kids go home for lunch.
Kids go to the local school.
There is no 'school run'. More than 90% walk/ride their bikes.
They're strongly encouraged from Kindergarten age to walk to school independantly (ie with other classmates, not parents)
They play outside, unsupervised well, loosly supervised, for hours and hours. My ds went out the minute he'd finished breakfast on Saturday, we saw him now & then , popped back for lunck, then dinner, then bed. He was out otherwise from 8 - 8. The freedom he has here is extremely rare if none existant in UK.

Not so long ago there was a discussion, mum cross cos her 7 yr old daughter while visiting friend had been allowed to park (at end of street & with walkie talkies) without an adult. Nearly every poster agreed they'd be upset too & reiterated their 7/8/9+0/11... yr old is not allowed out alone. My God that was shocking & depressing reading.

I opnly have mumsnet to give me an idea of what childhood in the uk is like now & it seems pretty depressing that kids don't have the freedom to just go out & play, to always have a supervising adult hovering about, to spend so in school or doing homework from such a young age.

When I return to uk it is always very striking how many fat people there are. Even grannies here ride their bikes about as normal part of daily life (doing better than me, far too hilly for me, I'm a wuss) There just isn't the fast food/snack/takeaway available here. In the avaeage uk town centre you can't walk morethan 2 yards before meeting the next sausage roll/burger/kfc. It's really very very noticeable how much food is so readily available out the street. You can't get away from it.

Conveneience food is more readily available than when we moved here 6 years ago, but still very limited. You have to cook from scratch really. In our town there's no fast food outlet or takeaway. I only ever have take aways when I come back to uk, which is why I always come back home about a stone heavier, lol. Not a good idea to squeeze a full English, fish and chip, a chinese takaeway and Indian takeaway into the space of 2 weeks. but it0's gotta be done.

I'm not having a go, or blaming, just pointing out the childhood experiences & freedom here are worlds away rom what I read here on mumsnet. And I feel very lucky to be here.

Think kids eat better generally now. There is far more consiousness of diet, though the bar has shifted-it is possible for low income families to have a worse diet than ever before. The odd MaccyD's is fine, IMO (not for my kids, but, you know....), its that some kids eat this daily which causes the problem.

Lots of people can no longer cook, and crap food is cheap. So of course more people are going to eat crap food, and give it to their kids.

BUT

Kids exercise far far less. Far far less. I played out as a child, that was maybe 15 years ago, not aeons ago. the whole morning til dark thing. No scheduled activities. Our telly was far to crappy to watch for long.

What I think has also been lost is the secrecy of chilhood. I remember building endless dens in the wood surrounding the park. We weren't supervised, thus requiring a certain amount of confidence and self sufficiency. When do today's kids get the chance to do this? Whole imaginative worlds away from adult intervention. Thats whats missing. I would hate for my kids to miss out.

Am very worried about this.

(Anyone else read "Toast" ? btw The story of the crap kids ate in the 70s. Very funny.)

monkey, your experience is very interesting and imho very relevant.

No exercise is certainly poisoning childhood and adulthood after that.

I think schools could and should play a big part in reversing this trend. The amount of PE in schools is minimal and has reduced hugely from when I was little. And half of the playing fields have been sold off which is criminal.

I would like to see 1 hour a day of PE in primary schools. This wouldn't be at the expense of academic studies because it would help children concentrate better - a healthy mind and a healthy body go together after all. Where is our Jamie Oliver equivalent for exercise in school?

how wierd. my post disappered.
I'll try again. I reckon, Mousiemousie, that Ian Wright is trying to fill this niche.

I also reckon 1 hour a day pe would be better than nothing, but lots of kids hate pe. They need less structure just running around in the fresh air, exploring, building dens, experimenting, using their own initiative without the guiding wisdom of an adult. Less tv :More fresh air & time with their mates. They need to learn surely that exercise is part of life & having fun, not having to go running, having to do pe, having to do x, y , z. but having races on their bikes, chasing each other. Having a laugh

It's all very well people writing about their personal experience of childhood or how they are managing to balance their own child's childhood, but, collectuvely, childhood in Britain appears to be pretty dysfunctional compared to other countries.

You can argue that it is parental angst making children's lives this way, but something had to be going wrong first for the angst to appear.

As adults, we set a very poor example (collectively). Too much screen time, too much emphasis on consumption and having the right things, working too many hours, ,long commutes, not enough time for cooking and family meal times, living in a bubble with little social interaction within the community, no sense of community, no regular sporting activities.

These are the examples (collectively) that we set for our children.

"Think kids eat better generally now. There is far more consiousness of diet"

I think this point says a lot more about our food culture (or lack of) It's the fact that we have to be consious of what we're feeding our children rather than just cooking and eating food we have grown up with.

In the past 20 years so much processed crap has taken over the supermarket shelves and infiltrated our diets. If this stuff had never appeared, our relationship with food would have continued unconsciously. It's the fact that there's so much rubbish food cheaply available that people have to make a conscious effort to go against that and eat 'healthy' food.

I would guess, in a country like France, that parents are picking off the shelves and feeding their children what they themselves ate as children, without there being a second thought about it.

yeah, pe is problematic, imo.

its all about making a few uber-fit uber-cooridnated kids...even more fit and even more co-ordinated. Its about turning exercise into a big competition and, IMO, is partly responsible for the lack of exercise in adults.

I think just more time to be in the playground is whats needed, tbh. More time to be active.

Or better still, we could all let our kids play out tonite. Get a book and a chair and sit outside with them. Give them some chalk and play hopscotch.

A big part of the problem also is that we don't have a culture of playing out, any more, so kids aren't so safe. We don't look out for "strange" kids.

plus yeah, agree beattie.

must go and get kids in car now

And housing developers are building housing estates or groups of houses with no landscaping or space for children to play in their own street.

I live in a 1960s house and (youngish) children do play out in my street. We're lucky to have a grassy area between the pavement and the road on both sides of the road. Plus people have a fair sized front garden which children also play in.

Developers today build houses that almost open out onto the street. The streets are narrow. There's not enough parking for cars so they park all along the street. And there are certainly no landscaped areas where children might be able to get together and play.

Without even thinking about Xbox , computers etc the TV alone has made a huge impact. When I was young there were no morning programmes for kids, maybe a couple of hours at tea-time and nothing on a Saturday....remember Saturday morning clubs at the cinema? (or am I really showing my age now). We had to make our own fun whether it was reading or art or making obstacle courses in the garden. It's taken away our kids ability to play.

Bring back the testcard - that will bore today's kids into exercise.

I've got a better idea - use the off button! And if that doesn't work fake a power cut and get out the board games.

I remember Saturday morning clubs at the cinema. Were parents allowed to leave us then and go off and do the shopping? Oooh - sounds good. Bring back the Saturday cinema clubs.

Actually, I think some places do them. I'm not sure if you're allowed to leave the children though.

I used to go to ours on the bus, with my brother. We were around 9 & 11 I think, then spend an hour in the library. There were much younger kids there too though, and no parents.

I used to go to saturday morning cinema club too & I'd like to think I'm not that old, lol.

SOrry for harping on, but in Switzerland, if a block of flats for example is built, it's complulsory for there to be a playground. Pretty much ever block of flats has it's own playground, or a coupl of blocks will share a large one. Also houses, we live in a new built semi. There are about 17 houses and we have a great play ground, but luckily just across the road there's also a proper sport ground with football pitch and running track and long jump etc.

Why should this not be the case all over? I think it's doing the kids a real disservice, and the country as a whole to neglect playing areas for children. Not just a fab great big park miles away, but plenty of well kept pockets in every neighbourhood. Kids are more likely to play if it's on their doorstep, not have to get imn tghe car & be driven theri, again dependant on adults.

I agree monkey. I find it sad that I have to go so out of my way to seek out areas for leisure. I don't have anywhere to cycle with the children (mine are very young and in a tralier) except on congested roads.

Kids definately have less freedom today compared to when I was a kid. Also there are just too much childrens merchandise and advertising compared to when was growing up. I seem to spend my life saying No and trying to explain why he cant have that cereal with the toy etc. I have tried to take a middle road with my 7 yr old. No T.V or computer games during school days - Another bugbear is constantly having to explain why he cant play games for 12 year old and aboves when his friends aged 7 can.
He is also not allowed to have a t.v and computer in his room as seems to be the case with some of the other kids. It would be lovely if he was able to go out adventuring all day like I did with my friends unsupervised. But I couldnt take the risk.

Wow , Saturday morning club! I loved that. It was brilliant and so cheap. I went there on my own, met up with friends - had a great time.