Spotting a great article by Active for Life recently triggered reflection on some strong themes that have been coming out of the sport and recreation conferences I’ve been to recently.  The article was about suggestions on how to get a young baby trained early in active lifestyle.  (Click to read)

What I’ve realised, is that many people in the general population are unaware of the recent facts about population health.  In other words, things we do set the next generation up for health and wellbeing—or not.  The responsibility is not just individual either.  There are ways you can impact your own kids…AND the neighbourhood you live in. Whether you have kids of your own or not, we can all play a part in a healthier environment, and a healthier tomorrow.

Some Useful Facts

Did you know that:

• Roughly 80% of Canadian children are NOT meeting the minimum guidelines for physical activity and not learning the important physical motor skills in the early stages? Sedentariness sets kids today up to be the first generation that dies younger than the generations before them?
• Approximately 50% of children born after 2000 are expected to get adult onset diabetes from sedentary lifestyle and too much sugar?
• Kids in Canada on average spend 3x the maximum amount of screen time recommended by the medical community? (6 hours a day, vs. max recommendation of 2)
• One child in Canada in a year is abducted by a stranger, but over 500 are lured online into unsafe situations?
• The biggest influence of later adult healthy active lifestyle is NOT organized sport participation OR phys ed in school…but doing fun active things with a parent or other adult role model?

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Individual Responsibility

Please don’t raise your kid like everyone around you does.

According to public health data, the majority of people around you are negatively impacting their child’s health for life. Please be different.  Please don’t cave in to peer pressure.

Don’t cave in to fear. If your nosy neighbour calls the children’s aid because you followed the health Canada and other well founded recommendations and let your kids walk to school or play outside without you, there is plenty of data to back up your decision.

Don’t cave in to their whining for screens or junky food.

One of the single biggest ways you can impact your kids’ performance at school is take sugar and processed foods out of their lunch and snack pack, and make time to do activities with them that are active.  Figuring out how to be stronger than their tempertantrum is worth it. If your kid had a temper tantrum because they wanted to drink poison, you wouldn’t let them. You have it in you to do the right thing.

Let them see you do fitness/active living. It’ll slow you down for a few years to do things with them, but they’ll catch up and you’ll have all these great memories.

Collective Responsibility

We have created what is now called an obesogenic environment.  We created it by allowing developers to get away with not creating parks within walking distance of houses, of creating backyards too small for pick-up sports.  We created it by allowing the media focus on the small percentage of scary incidents, to dictate buy cialis no prescription uk decisions https://www.sihspune.org/propecia.php about daily life. We also swallowed the fiction of individual family responsibility.

Only affluent families (less than 30% of the Canadian population) have the luxury of rising above the obesogenic environment to guarantee a healthy lifestyle for children.  Given the divorce rate and high numbers of children in broken/split families, as well as the average household Canadian income, the majority of kids are not in families with sufficient affluence to provide for health and wellbeing as an individual parent or nuclear family decision.  The average household income in Canada is $60K. That is not enough to own a house in many jurisdictions.  It also means that a lot of households are well below that. On CBC radio recently, I  heard that 25% of Canadian households are paying more for housing than they can afford, and 1/8^th of them can’t find adequate, affordable housing.

Around 75% of Canadians cannot afford sport programs for their kids. Many Canadians don’t know how to engage their children in sport and physical activity.  So, in addition to taking care of your own kids, you can help turn our obesogenic environment into a health promotive environment, by advocating for community facilitation of physical activity regardless of income or family situation.  Some extremely easy to do options include:

• Protest and lobby housing development plans in your community that do not include a park within child walking distance to the houses…and a park that is big enough for family pickup soccer (not taken over and booked solid by organized sport), and also has nature and other features that promote informal physical activity and physical literacy learning.
• Attend municipal council and committee of the whole meetings and ask questions. Citizens can attend, and there are question periods. By being aware of what is going on in your community, you can spark dialogue.
• Volunteer to be on committees.
• Write letters in your local paper.
• Get together with your neighbours or a more formal community hub like your church or synagogue and hold ‘all family’ activities that include physical activity and are inclusive of single parents…and the kids of single parents who can’t be there. The average household needs 77 billable hours a week to survive. Households where people are on minimum wage need 88. Do the math on a single parent household and you can figure out pretty quickly that as much as that parent would love to spend more time with their child, they have to choose between feeding and housing their child, or having time to play together. Make wellbeing and life more possible for others.
• Get outside with your kids or someone else’s or as a group. On my street there are many kids that play street hockey and basketball. When they were younger, there was at least one parent on the block that hung out with them. What a great influence and support not only for his own kids, but for the other kids on the block whose dads were absent.

 

Heather Sansom, MA, PhD candidate Heather Sansom is a management professional and sport and wellbeing coach, currently researching positive development and resilience through nature-based physical activity through her PhD with the University of Guelph. www.heathersansom.ca