backassed bragging

[firecat]

I think I'm pretty smart. And I did well in school.

But if—as is reported in the latest junkfoodscience post—"Jocks tend to be better students than couch potatoes," I can only imagine how much smarter I would have been if I'd had more enforced physical activity as a schoolkid (in the name of preventing obesity of course). Not only would I have been skinny, but I would have been so smart that I probably would have invented some superweapon and the Earth would now be a ring of ashes orbiting Venus.

Especially check out the part of the article that discusses the "activity pyramid." It has "schoolwork, homework, reading, computer games, TV, videos, eating, resting, and sleeping" in a tiny triangle at the top, the same triangle that contains "fats" on the food pyramid.

Comments

[firecat]

Imagine that, children allowed to make their own choices about physical activity! You're such a radical.

[mac-arthur-park.livejournal.com]

Ayup. I have this silly idea that, after a certain age (the boys are 8 and 10), if you treat children like people...they'll behave that way. I'm not saying let them loose to smoke cigars, watch Three Stooges marathons and eat Cheetos for breakfast. However, letting them make informed choices about their lives makes them PEOPLE, not kids.

I'm probably not articulating this well.

[firecat]

I've found it works well to treat kids as people. I don't have kids of my own and am rarely solely responsible for any, so I don't know where the limits of this technique are, although I'm pretty sure there are some.

I mean, smoking cigars around other people without their consent is just rude, no matter how old the people involved are.

[micheinnz.livejournal.com]

She's not the only one. Agent Weasel, who is nine, has always been freely able to choose whether or not she played any type of organised sports. And now she plays two winter sports, two summer sports, all of her own choosing, and has swimming lessons. (Only the swimming lessons have been foisted on her by her parents, and we treat them as a survival skill rather than a sport in its own right.)