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Wake-up call for kids
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Educating children about the benefits of exercise is vital for their health
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HOW DOES one motivate young people to exercise? In an ideal world, school games, parental encouragement and the popularity of sports on TV would do the job, but in reality that is not the case. Watching sports on TV more often than not encourages children to buy a big bag of chips and a cola drink rather than a new pair of sneakers.
TV, the Internet, video games and parental pressure to study more and play less ensure today's children have less time for play than their counterparts 20 years ago. And being sedentary is a habit that only gets worse with time. Meanwhile, obesity is fast becoming an epidemic that will soon kill more people in India than tobacco does now.
There is little doubt that getting children and teenagers to exercise is important, but exactly how one can achieve this is the question. The answer is education, but not the kind that simply says that exercise is good for you.
Studies show that health counselling works best when it is personalised. It is not enough to tell youngsters the long list of diseases they risk by being sedentary.
That kind of info simply does not register with people who think they will live forever. The health information must include the particular individual's peculiar susceptibility to an illness, given his or her age and weight.
For example, a real wake up call for youngsters is when they type in their weight, height and age into a health website questionnaire and the site comes up with an instant estimate of the person's life expectancy. An obese 20-year-old is more likely to exercise when he learns that his weight-for-height means that he probably won't live to see his 40th birthday.
Information about the severity of the potential illness motivates people to take up exercise. Schools should organise trips to hospitals and ensure children get to hear first-hand the life stories of the obese: the heart problems, skeletal problems, depression, low self-esteem, hypertension, etc.
Third, schools must teach more forcefully the benefits of exercise. They must invite doctors and those who successfully lost weight by exercising to explain how achieving a healthy body weight by exercising improves health.
Finally, parents and teachers must work together to identify obstacles to a child taking up exercise and games. For example, is the child being bullied in the playground?
All this talk of getting children to play might sound like a lot of fuss about something children are eager to do anyway. But the rising level of heart disease and strokes among people still in their 30s shows that more, not less, fuss is necessary.
RAJIV M.
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