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The Bad News About Couch Potatoes
An Excerpt
By Rae Pica
often home alone and have been instructed to remain indoors. Since children forced to stay inside are unlikely to do a lot of heart-pumping activity, or even to put on a CD and dance, the only after-school movement likely is that from the couch to the refrigerator and back again.
Then, of course, there's the space factor. Should they somehow have the time and the opportunity, most children don't have the wide-open fields, the empty lots and the traffic-free streets we played in as kids. And even if there are playgrounds nearby, according to the National Program for Playground Safety, public playgrounds are often not what they ought to be in terms of design, maintenance and supervision. All of this means that should the children venture outdoors, there's no room to roam. Nor do their parents want them to! Fears of abduction and dangers too frightening to imagine have parents keeping a tight rein on their young children these days.
David Elkind, author of The Hurried Child (Perseus, 2001), contends that today's children are no more at risk than their predecessors but that, "thanks to television, we learn about every violent or obscene crime against children in alarming and graphic detail." Still, parents wonder, if there's even a remote possibility, why risk it?
Finally, there's the matter of competition for the child's attention. As you're probably aware, unlike when we were growing up, it's pretty fierce these days.
This article is excerpted from Your Active Child: Physical, Emotional and Cognitive Development Through Age-Apropriate Activity (McGraw-Hill, 2003).
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