Fat kids with no legs [06.12.04]
By Jared Read
You can't get away from the hot topic of childhood obesity these days. And you can't get away from obese children, either
Drive past any school in the morning and at tea time, and you'll see hordes of them flobbering out of Citroen Xsara Picassos (or in posh areas BMW X5s), usually shovelling the remnants of a king size Mars bar down their gullets, which will provide the energy they need not to play football or cricket, but power the stubby thumb they use for texting their equally lardy friends.
When I was a lad, there were hardly any fat kids, apart from the token one in every class whose parents invariably owned either the local fish shop or sweet shop. These flabby fortunates earned a place on the school social scale that transcended all rules by mere virtue of their folks' chosen profession. Friendship meant big portions of chips or free Anglo bubblies for life.
So what's changed? Well we used to either walk to school or walk to the bus stop (yes, even in the rain). On the odd occasion when I was dropped off at the school gates, it was the ultimate embarrassment necessitating a seat-belt-off, door-open, leg-it-fast manoeuvre. As for junk food, I don’t think I ate a McDonalds until I was 15.
So here's my call to action: lobby your local headmaster to impose a one mile drop- off exclusion zone around their school and explain why it's a win-win situation all round. Little kids could be walked in and enjoy extra quality time with mum / dad / au pair. Teenagers could walk to school themselves and therefore have the freedom to fit in their first fag of the day before registration. Everyone gets fitter and thinner and the rest of us get to avoid the traffic clog around schools.
With logic like this, who needs a nanny state?
Have your say...
Ah happy days, I too remeber walking the 2 miles to primary school. We went past the church and across the farmer's field, in which we stopped to play on balmy summer evenings. In the winter, we collected conkers on the way to take home and soak overnight in vinegar, ready for the next day's conker fighting contests.
At high school, children from villages all around caught the 8 o'clock bus to school together. Great hoardes of children would then walk again across fields to get to the school gates arriving early and playing in the grounds until the very last second before the bell rang for school at 9.
Some complain that children can't walk to school any more because it's no longer safe. Is this really the case that there is a villain around every corner, or is it merely that in this age of media omnipotence, every local incident is given global coverage and thereby made to feel more prevalent?
This may not be the case, but what I do know is this, kids who walked to school with their friends in all weather and played outside until the sun went down, were a generation of children who learned to communicate clearly with one another, were physically stronger, more tolerant, innovative and eager to explore the unknown. The sixties and seventies produced a generations of children who went on to become some of our most innovative and succesful. And not a fat kid in sight.
So you see, fresh air might not be such a bad thing after all, and it works wonders on those legs!
Dolores [prego*]
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