Great ideas get better when they are
shared and as part of that effort, we have asked several people to share their
ideas with us! Today’s entry was written by our guest, Chanpory Rith at LifeClever, an interaction designer
with a fresh perspective on the world. You can subscribe to LifeClever here.
Every year, more
children are playing sports. So why are they still fat?
With so many
kids in organized sports like soccer and Little League, you’d think our kids
would be getting healthier. In reality, the rate of childhood obesity and
related health problems (diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, and perhaps
even cancer) is increasing instead of decreasing.
Why? Because
organized athletics focuses on the wrong thing: winning.
A mirror of
professional sports, children’s athletics imposes a model of sports based on
competition—not on health, wellness, and overall life balance. In short, it
doesn’t consider the child as a whole.
By focusing on
winning, our children aren’t learning basic concepts of diet, nutrition, or
life balance. It’s no wonder our children’s health is suffering.
Children deserve
better.
Here’s a
radically obvious idea: Let’s look beyond competition and winning, and focus on
the need for life balance. Below are some basic ideas about how to encourage a
greater sense of healthy, balanced living in childhood athletics:
Think beyond
the competitive playing field
Simply put, kids
don’t have to compete on an organized sports team to get exercise and stay fit.
Physical activity does not have to be a scheduled and structured event.
Physical activity can and should be encouraged through everyday activity. Compartmentalizing
it within the rigid confines of organized sports gives kids a disincentive to
exert themselves in day-to-day life.
The solution is
quite simple: encourage physical activity and exertion in the everyday lives of
kids. Such encouragement can come in the most basic forms.
For instance,
children should be encouraged, when reasonable, to walk to and from school. Depending
on the surrounding neighborhood, walking to school can be an individual act
performed by a single student.
Or it can be a
more regularized approach to organized walking, like the program sponsored by
the Safe Routes to School Program in Chicago.
The program enables large groups of children to walk to school together, led by
parent-chaperones. This safety-in-numbers approach fosters regular physical
activity, while also acknowledging the dangerous realities kids may face on the
way to and from school every day.
Other examples
include encouraging kids to take the stairs, or to mow the grass, or to garden
in the yard. The point is this: physical activity and healthier living can be
nurtured on a practical, everyday level. It need not and should not end when
our kids step off the field of play.
Get Disorganized!
Counterintuitive
as it seems, recent studies show that nothing—including organized
sports—reduces a child’s likelihood for becoming obese than regular
participation in spontaneous “disorganized” sports like street hockey, bike
riding, break dancing, and games invented on-the-fly by children themselves.
How can this be
so?
Because, in
organized team sports like baseball, basketball, football, and soccer, many
children (especially ones who need physical activity the most) are always
sitting in the bench, sedentary and waiting for their turn to participate.
Instead of having all this idle time on their hands, these kids could be
jumping into unstructured, fully engaging unorganized activities. They’re
likely to have more fun because our kids can make their own rules and set their
own terms for what they want to get out of the physical activity.
Overly organized
team sports tend to confine kids’ natural sense of free play and physicality.
We should nurture instead of stifling these tendencies. We should not favor the
rigid structures of competitive team sports at the expense of spontaneous play
where kids are more likely to be on the move all the time.
Encourage
more involvement by women, especially mothers, in organized sports to promote a
stronger sense of balance.
Some estimates
put the number of “sports moms” in America around 45-50 million. Yet
it’s still unusual to see a female coach in an organized sports league. It’s
even more surprising to see women as administrators, managers, and decision-makers
in kids’ sports leagues. It’s been nearly forty years after Title IX leveled
the playing field for women to participate in sports among institutions
receiving federal funds. To see so few women in athletic leadership positions
today is troubling and just bad for our kids’ health.
Encouraging the
participation of women—and especially of mothers—in the organized sports
apparatus would enable kids’ sports to more closely reflect values culturally
associated with women rather than merely reflecting more masculine ideals. It
would put connectedness and collaboration on par with competition. The effect
could balance the rather skewed winning-at-all-costs priorities that now make
sports less fun and less healthy for kids.
Women are indeed
the greatest untapped resource in kids’ sports. The increased participation of
mothers especially could serve as a moderating influence on how children
approach organized sports. This, in turn, could lead to healthier, more
balanced attitudes among a broader range of children taking part in organized
physical activity.
Do you have a great idea for improving
sports? You can share it at PasstheBall.com. There you can also rate and comment
on other ideas. And right now, you can also tell ESPN how to improve the ESPYs!
So come on, pass the ball!
