Children's changing health

When my children were younger (they're 16, 19 and three weeks short of 21 now), there was some concern among some parents about keeping the kids active. Computers weren't all the rage quite yet and movies were only available in VHS (or beta!), so TV was really the major competition for exercise.

I did notice, very early, that there weren't kids playing outside in the same numbers as when I was a child. When we brought our kids to a local park, there may be a few other children playing, but very often, ours were the only ones there. This was the same park I played at as a child and was always full of kids - alone - all day long.

I know that things are different now, particularly with most families having both parents working, but we have to look at what this is doing to our children. For many, the only physical activity they get is in organized sports (if parents can afford it) or gym class at school (if they have it).

I've seen playgrounds at schools where children are banned from playing any of the active games that we played, for fear of injury. One friend even told me that tag was banned at her cousin's school because too many children were getting hurt running and tripping on the concrete. You see, many schools don't have grass either.

Add to that, many of the kids who would have walked to school in "the old days" are now driven by parents, the lack of time on weekends to go outside and play because of all the stuff that needs to be caught up, is there any wonder we're looking at record numbers of obesity, high cholesterol and type 2 diabetes in *children*?

It's just going to get worse. The more we try to protect our kids, the worse we are making it for them. Here are a couple of the most recent stories in the news: Inactive kids face 6-fold risk of heart disease by teen years, study finds and Keep on running.

We worry too much about our kids - seriously. I know a few people I knew thought I was nuts to let my kids do some of the stuff they did. My oldest used to go outside with his friend, on their bikes, and go dirt bike riding near the river and across some farm land behind our house (we live in a suburb that borders some farms). They'd be gone for hours. My daughter didn't get into the same sort of thing, but she did dance competitively for quite a while and played organized sports. My youngest son did some of the stuff his older brother did, but he got more involved with wilderness and camping stuff - and he's involved in a weekly floor hockey program.

We have to go back to letting kids be kids. There has got to be a better way to balance our need to protect them with their needs to be free to do things that will help them grow up strong and healthy.

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Letting our children grow up and away

As a parent, you do your best to protect your children. Of course, you don’t want anything to ever happen to them, but from time to time, accidents do happen.

I know that when my kids were small, as much as it pained me to see them scrape their knees or hurt themselves, I knew that it was all part of growing up and exploring. I see some parents telling their children not to run because they may fall, not to climb because they may slip. Yes, they may, but they have to run and climb too. Scrapes heal, bruises go away – but being constantly told you shouldn’t or can’t do something because you might get hurt, takes away from the ability to make your own choices about what you should and shouldn’t do. It’s not as if my children were accident-free. From broken bones to stitches to emergency surgery for appendicitis, we had our share of hospital visits, that I can say.

Of course, I’m not talking about letting your child pull over a pan of boiling water or sticking a fork into an electrical socket, but allowing your child to climb on a jungle gym, playing superman with a towel clothespinned to a t-shirt, or having a pillow fight with a friend are activities that can end up with an injury, or with lots of giggles.

We weren’t the type of parents who sent our children to camp. For one thing, they were way too expensive for us and another – important – thing was that our kids weren’t the type to want to go away to camp. Until 3 years ago, when my youngest son came home with a pamphlet for a camp two hours north of us; it was a sports/wilderness camp for boys 12 years old and up. It has been around for many years. I knew someone whose son had gone for a few years and had begun to work there as a leader-in-training. At first, my heart sank when my son came home all enthusiastic about going, because I thought, there is no way on earth that we can afford to send him to a sleep-away camp for two weeks. Tht is, until I found out that it only cost 375.00. That’s right. For the full two weeks. It’s a camp that gets funding from many different sources to make it and keep it affordable. It’s been around for so long that many of the campers are sons of men who went to there.

When my son came home after his first summer there (two weeks), he said to me in the car, “Mom, I did things that I never imagined myself ever doing.” I thought I was going to cry. He climbed rocks faces, jumped into rivers, kayaked, camped, and just had a wonderful, wonderful time. And it was the beginning of something wonderful for him.

After two summers of being a camper, last summer, he was invited to participate in a special week at the beginning of the session, reserved for boys who the leaders saw as being potential leaders. My son was ecstatic because becoming a leader had now become a serious goal. While he was there that week, he did even more things that he never imagined, including kayaking on rapids. What I found out later is that something went wrong on one of those trips and he could have been severely hurt, even killed, at one point. There was a miscommunication somewhere and my son went down some rapids and headed straight for a log that was across the river. Quick thinking had him flip upside down, but then the fast current made it almost impossible to tear off his kayak skirt so that he could right himself. He told me after that this was “the most scared” he had ever been.

Part of me was severely ticked that this could happen, but a bigger part of me knows that accidents happen and that we can’t wrap our kids in cotton batting and still expect them to be able to go out and challenge life head on. I am so forever grateful that he escaped unscathed and I know what could have happened. However, he could have stayed home and almost been hit by a car crossing the street too. Life is full of challenges and dangers. So, what did my husband and I do Sunday evening? We dropped off our son for yet another week of this leadership training. We know that what happened last year was an accident and that the leaders are now aware of the breakdown in communication. We know that we have to let our kids do things, to try things. And we have to hope and pray that they come out ahead at the end.

Just like when my daughter broke her arm, or my oldest son broke his elbow, my heart sank when my youngest told me of his kayaking adventure. But, as with all the other accidents the kids have had, I know that holding them back won’t keep them safe. Holding them back would only encourage, in a sneaky way, other types of risk taking. So, I let them go. I hold my breath and I wait for them to come back. And then I listen to all that they learned. And I never forget those words from my son, “Mom, I did things that I never imagined myself ever doing.” That makes it all worth it to me.

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