Just when hard-pressed parents – struggling to make ends meet and buckling under the pressure to meet the myriad of demands modern day life throws at them – think that no more challenges can be forthcoming, comes disturbing news.
Their precious little offspring are rapidly being infected by an infliction which may well soon by called the Roly-Poly Syndrome.
Sport coaches have for some time alerted us to the development of this blubbering menace, but increasingly scientific research is confirming what we actually know already and see every day in our malls and on our beaches.
Our children are becoming fat and lethargic. The medical fraternity has a kinder word for it – obesity.
Dieticians say the number of pre-teen obesity and overweight patients has tripled over the past three years.
The SA Medical Research Council reports that in 2012 more than 17% of urban South African children between the ages of one and nine were overweight.
These are frightening statistics.
And the cause?
Simple really. Our children don’t play anymore. They can’t, not since the criminals have been given the freedom of our towns.
So, unless they are linked in to school sport activities, they sit holed up behind the locked gates and burglar bars at home watching TV or working their cellphones and iPads while munching chips, chocolate and ice cream, or drifting aimlessly through shopping centres consuming large quantities of unhealthy burgers, milkshakes and fizzy drinks.
Their physical activities are double digit calorie burners, but their ‘fuel’ intake is triple digit stuff.
The outcome can be nothing else but unhappy fat children with no energy or drive to achieve anything. They are trapped in a zombie-like existence.
Psychological imprisonment
More disturbing is that, apart from the obvious health consequences which they no doubt will suffer, is the psychological damage they won’t escape.
Studies clearly show that obese children are regarded by ‘normal’ children as the least desirable playmates.
They are taunted and ridiculed, bullied and excluded. Cruel, yes, but a fact of life and a situation which will leave them scarred forever.
Young children do not have the knowledge and wisdom to foresee the future of hardships and rejection while they indulge in their comfort foods.
The only people they can look up to, to save them from themselves, are their parents.
We, as adults, have a pressing responsibility to look out for our children and do the right thing on their behalf to ensure they don’t find themselves on the fringe od society, doomed to a perpetual state of depression and unhappiness.
There is no rocket science involved. Your child is fat or not, happy or unhappy, energetic or lethargic.
Face up to the truth and do something – today!
Take responsibility for healthy diets and, above all, take them out to play as much as possible and let them laugh a lot.
The first turnaround steps from a doomed child to a confident, zesty individual facing a bright future will be almost instantanious.
