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If Canada's children are shockingly sedentary - generation couch-potato - their parents are to blame. The most active parents have the most active children, according to a report from the Canadian Fitness and Lifestyle Research Institute. The least active children have the least active parents.
There's a parallel to cigarette smoking. Twenty years of anti-smoking campaigns aimed at youth had scant results. It was only when adults started butting out en masse, in response to new workplace smoking laws that helped make the practice a social no-no, that young people got the message. Twenty years of hectoring about too much "screen time," chips and pop are not likely to achieve much, either, until parents rid themselves of their own sloth and begin to shake, rattle and roll. (Or at least roll.)
Some of the data on how children live today are so extreme that the natural response is to stick one's head in the sand. Average daily screen time (including television and computer or video games): six hours. Weekend screen time: seven hours a day. Percentage of school-age children doing 90 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity each day: 12 per cent. Percentage doing 60 minutes a day: 31 per cent. Only one in three children even walk or bike to school in cities (and one in 10 in rural communities). Whatever happened to the children's willingness to move around and play (insert complicated set of excuses here) has become so entrenched it seems unchangeable.
Legislation is not likely to be of help. A federal tax subsidy for children's participation in sports has mainly benefited the middle and upper classes, who could already afford the programs anyway, according to Active Healthy Kids Canada, a non-profit group. More organized sports are not the answer, in any event. Children and their parents are already too rushed, harried, overprogrammed.
The cost is not just in obesity and related medical problems. It is in the loss of play - free or unstructured play - from childhood. Free play is essential to growing up healthy, and it is probably no coincidence that as the time devoted to it shrinks, rates of depression rise in young people, says the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Free play produces no trophies, no out-of-town tournaments, no scoring statistics, no proud parents. It may or may not produce anything tangible. Perhaps for that reason it has fallen out of fashion in our achievement-obsessed society, first among parents and then, inevitably, among the children.
Parents wish to give their children every opportunity. The opportunity to be a child comes only once, and is built on a foundation of play.