The Fit Old Days
Submitted by Boys and Schools Blog
Lately, my husband and I have been taking the boys out to play tennis quite a bit. I will confess that in this context, the term, “play,” means that they first get to run around and pick up tennis balls for us before we get to the part where they get to swing at a few. (I say, “swing at,” instead, “hit a few,” to more accurately describe the activity going on.) Hey, it’s a time-honored way to learn tennis, following in the footsteps of my own childhood and many of my friends. Like how sushi chefs are supposed to spend their first year or so just learning to make the rice. Yes, we’re training them to be Master Ball Picker-Uppers.
Still, it’s exercise, and as far as they know, it’s fun. What’s more, it turns the lesson part of the day into a treat, so I consider it decent strategy. And when you consider how strange and partitioned the divide between fun and exercise is starting to get, even for children, it makes me wonder where we’re going with our ideas of fitness and youth. Hold on a second while I get out the rocking chair and the bourbon.
Ok, there we are. Now as I was saying, back in my day, especially during the summer, play was exercise–though (to be fair) I did live in the kind of suburban neighborhood that made this easy to accomplish. There were various sports activities that our parents would sign us up for–swimming teams, soccer teams, tennis camps, etc.–all of which had some competitive element to them, but still fell into the Fun/Play category. Those who were doing sports as a truly competitive endeavor had more specialized programs to enter (traveling teams, high-level leagues, and so on). Now, it seems that the whole system is just getting more and more disjointed. I’ve seen preschool soccer teams with a dysfunctional mix of parents who think the whole thing is supposed to be a form of playgroup, parents who would like to see something approximating soccer being taught, and parents who seem to have mistaken their daughter for the second coming of Pele in a match only slightly more important than a World Cup Final. I might be succumbing to an excess of nostalgia here, but as adults we seem to be so fractured and frenzied and scheduled in the way we try to balance play and work that it sometimes looks like we’re arranging our own children’s lives in similar ways.
Ok, time to send crotchety ol’ Malia away and get to the point. This entire rant was spurred by the recent report from Texas finding only a minority of schoolchildren achieving a healthy level of fitness. And the percentage of fit children seems to drop as they get older. Somewhat shockingly, in elementary school, fewer boys than girls were consider fit, though that statistic reverses (barely) by high school. I don’t want to make too much of this study, since the article seems to indicate that there is plenty of room for reporting errors and there’s much detail about the fitness test itself. But it does make me wonder what is going on with exercise and our children. Have we really become that much more sedentary a culture in just a generation or so?
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