Subway Restaurants are running a sharp ad campaign which pokes fun at the expanding American waistline. In one spot, an average pair of domesticates rolls through a fast food drive thru and orders the love handles combo with a side of thunder thighs. In another, a child sits playing a Pac-Man type video game in which his self styled avatar chomps through a maze of burgers and fries, amassing fat calorie points which bloat the character. Eventually, he reaches the final challenge - jumping through a slim portico into a gigantic banana split- but he’s grown so large that he can’t squeeze into the opening, resulting in a swift game over.
It’s quite easy to argue that the United States has turned into a nation of…well, let’s just call ourselves tender and juicy. We’ve been bombarded with fatty statistics by the mass media and certain city councils have even barred the use of unhealthy cooking methods - such as double frying chocolate cake in trans fats. Reports from Britain, France, Germany and parts of Asia show that the golden arches are not only a harbinger of free trade but also Mc-bypass surgeries and sluggish youngsters. But while the ads attempt to humorously charge Subway with the noble ability to reshape the loosed midsections of the industrialized world, I believe that linking entertainment technology such as video games to childhood obesity requires a few qualifiers.
Adults - represented by the mass media, teachers and parents - are handing kids a hard lot. Everywhere they turn, kids are being told they’re too fat and too thin, rather lazy and too “plugged” in. With such opposing judgments weighing on their fragile little egos, it’s no wonder kids these days are such brats.
In a recent Daily Mail article, British writer Steve Myall reported that as young people aged 14 to 17 required an increasing amount of medical attention during the period of 1996 to 2006, the number of children requiring treatment for falls from trees fell 36%.
In addition to a decline in the traditional childhood pastime of tree climbing, and its subsequent plunges, accidents associated with bicycle riding have also suffered. These numbers cause anxiety among British parents concerned with a possible lack of visceral experience, because, strangely enough, accidents and injuries are rather helpful in early childhood development. And experience, they argue, is something the kids aren’t getting from their electronic babysitters.
“Climbing trees and falling out of them is all part of growing up,” a spokesperson for The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (ROSPA) told the Daily Mail. “Having small injuries helps children learn about risk.”
According to the ROSPA website, a child who tumbles from a low height- a tree limb or balance beam- learns of the physical pain associated with falls. “The minor pain and discomfort from the low fall has warned them of the dangers of falling from greater heights,” the website says. “They are therefore less likely to try walking across a plank between two garage roofs, falling 2.5m and fracturing their skull.” Well, here’s hoping.
But don’t these so-called informed “adults” know just how dangerous tree climbing and physical activity in general can be? According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, 140 children die and millions more are injured in falls each year. A decline in falls would hopefully mean fewer whiny kids walking around asking you to sign their casts. Also, children don’t have jobs and don’t pay taxes; which means the $347 billion their common injuries cost the U.S. healthcare system comes entirely from someone else’s pockets—think about that, potential breeders.
“Climbing trees gives kids an appreciation of [their] surroundings,” lifelong tree climber and Mighty Oak Tree Climbing Co. employee Alan Stock told the Daily Mail. “But playing computer games doesn’t really teach us anything. It’s easy to end up sitting indoors for hours on end…it’s the culture we are in– the computerized age.”
Well, maybe that’s the point we’re all missing, you silly tree hugger, because even President Bush understands that we’re living in the era of “blogospheres and internets.” Perhaps grown ups are becoming rather anachronistic when faced with the technical savvy of their offspring: watching little Suzy text on her Sidekick [GMH1]with total awesomeness while Dad struggles to turn on his new Blackberry. Sure, your kids aren’t frolicking in the bygone hi-jinx that made your childhood so memorable, but at least they’re spending the better part of their waking hours safe in make believe Playstation worlds. It’s more than enough to launch any ex-cardboard Apollo pilot onto a nostalgic shame spiral.
In addition to fearing for the over-plumping of today’s youth, critics worldwide are worried about a rise in childhood repetitive strain injuries (RSI). A condition that traditionally affects office grinders, factory blokes and burly jack hammerers, cases of RSI in children have grown year after year. William Lenihan, of the Osteopathic Pain Relief Center in Singapore, told Reuters that “[these injuries] are in the long term very detrimental to the whole body and once RSI comes on, it’s very difficult to stop.”
Let’s weigh the possible outcomes from these two childhood activities: the use of muscle for arborous purposes versus many hours of silent bliss spent attached to some handheld electronic device. A child can climb a tree, fall out, break a bone, and force an emergency room trip that cost thousands of dollars of their parent’s hard earned money. Or instant message online while playing Nintendo and texting their friends- which in turn teaches multitasking skills preparing them for the lifelong drudgery of office work - and possibly develop RSI, a malady they will certainly suffer from in adulthood while chained to their desks and PDAs. At least then they’ll be paying for any accrued medical bills with their own cash.
Also, Virgin Mobile addressed text messaging injuries among customers by joining forces with the British Chiropractic Association and the RSI Association back in 2002. The “How to Practice Safe Text” campaign made customers “aware that aches in the fingers can be alleviated by some simple exercises, so that they can continue to text to their heart’s content- safely!”
And according to Reuters, proper posture and play breaks - two key factors in preventing injury - are now stressed on Playstation and Nintendo Wii’s respective websites.
“Prevention is always better than cure,” says William Lenihan. You see, medicine and market forces in action…problem solved.
Speaking of markets, while British and American parents have been obsessing over their incredible expanding babies, the Japanese invented a game console that has American children sweating, staring at video screens, and getting excited about gym class. Long popular among kids in arcades and suburban living rooms, Dance Dance Revolution, or DDR, is being adopted by school systems in order to entice their marginal and otherwise non-athletic students into participating in physical education classes. For all three of you unfamiliar with this thoroughly modern and hip game, DDR players stomp and jump on cardinally arranged arrows while loud electronic dance music fills every possible aural crevice.
An April 30th New York Times article by Seth Schiesel noted that DDR “has become a small craze among a generation of young Americans who appear less enamored of traditional team sports than their parents were and more amenable to the personal pursuits enabled by modern technology.” DDR appeals to the lowest common denominator of students: the ones who previously played Mario Bros. over the embarrassment of highly skilled games of kick ball.
According to Seth Schiesel’s article, West Virginia - a national leader in obesity, diabetes and hypertension - plans to have Dance Dance Revolution as part of physical education in each of its 765 public schools by 2008. DDR is already found in almost all of West Virginia’s 185 middle schools. Hawaii is developing a similar program that will introduce DDR into all of their educational systems’ 265 public schools.
If the coal mining and aloha states are in any way indicative of popular trends, children nationwide will soon be jumping up and down while blaringly loud knock offs of Cher’s “Do You Believe in Life After Love” draw blood from the ears of the over 30s. It may not be as cool as Guitar Hero, a similar Japanese hand eye mimicry game popular among dope smoking college kids, but it’s a start.
What may be DDR’s greatest achievement is its ability to include children traditionally left in the bleachers by traditional sports playing.
“I like that you get to listen to music and you don’t have to be on a team or go anywhere special to play,” 12-year-old Anna Potter told The New York Times. “If you do baseball or basketball, people get really competitive about it.” Anna’s friend, 13-year-old Mikayala Leombruno, added: “You don’t have to be good at [DDR] to get a good work out.”
These two little girls, as well as the states of West Virginia and Hawaii, demonstrate a courage that is quite remarkable in the face of the behemoth of traditional team sports. Not unlike tree climbing, team sports have become a marrow snapping, life ruining pursuit; a bloody factory farm for the world of professional sports, eerily similar to the turn o’ the century slaughterhouses which once employed child workers. The kids enter as innocent lambs and leave as mangled carcasses of empty dreams. And what is worse is that Mr. and Mrs. America don’t really seem to care.
Dr. Ronald Kamm, a sports psychiatrist, told Regan McMahon, author of Revolution in the Bleachers: “We enacted child labor laws 80 years ago to protect children from all this work. And now we’re making play into work. And they’re working as hard as they used to in the sweat shops.”
Dr. Kamm is speaking about modern youth sports. Those summers of Little League so many adults fantasize over are long gone. Student athletes now play single sports year round, with stricter practicing and game schedules than most professionals, and without any “off seasons” to let their growing bodies recuperate.
By “specializing” in one sport, which over emphasizes single muscle groups, and playing these sports year round, doctors are finding that by the time these children reach high school age they’ve already endured the wear and tear of a veteran baseball pitcher. Dr. Kamm agrees that while child prodigies like Tiger Woods and Tara Lipinski do exist, it’s best for most kids to play multiple sports to prevent overuse injuries and general mental burn out.
In Revolution in the Bleachers, Regan McMahon writes that “many households are putting demanding sports schedules above bonding rituals such as eating dinner together, taking family vacations, spending holidays with relatives and relaxing at home on weekends.” One must wonder if the nostalgic dreams of fathers who never made it professionally - because they blew out their knee sophomore year or took up guitar playing and drugs as freshmen - are involved in arranging these physically destructive sports schedules. And there’s a blatant irony that McMahon points out.
“Parents are putting their kids at risk having them play year-round so they can one day play professionally,” she wrote in a related article in The San Francisco Chronicle. “And the pros are starting to be wary of players who may have worn out their arms trying to get to the majors.”
The experts and statistics agree: American parents are violently breeding their offspring into a super race of professional athletes. Such a torturous form of unilateral child rearing seems much less preferable to a youth spent red-eyed, sore-thumbed and a few pounds worse for wear. Doesn’t it? I guess some parents do desire to have bitter, alcoholic has been relief pitchers who once resembled their teenagers.
Maybe we should consider that the fact that children are getting chubbier is just a cultural evolution. Cell phones and PS2’s are this generation’s television, or eight track, or beta player, or internet; and flabby abs will be the new shortened attention span. Remember when your parents and grandparents told you stories of walking up hill both ways in the snow and the hours they spent chewing tree bark for giggles; remember how condescended you felt when they told you just how good you have it. Imagine being handed a lifestyle and its fancy electronic trinkets and then being told how lazy and ugly you are for embracing it. Zombie eyes are rolling and strained digits are being thumbed behind backs just as peace pipes were smoked and corvettes revved; just as dead man’s turn was raced and Vision Street Wear was totally thrashed.
In the same breath, parents should keep picking at their kids. It’s your right. Just as one generation will never have to suffer the trials of transatlantic immigration, another will never suffer the drought and mass exodus of a Great Depression. Hopefully, my generation won’t have to face the division and disgrace our parents endured by fighting un-winnable land wars.
Aw hell, just pass the joystick.
