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Our kid’s health – are we dropping the ball? Part 1

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Sports Development Sociologist and Professional Sports Coach _ Scott Windus

Our kid’s health – are we dropping the ball?

Part 1

As global communities speed towards relentless progress, hailed as ‘development’, should we pause to reflect on the state of our children’s health? The results of any active and healthy report card from numerous countries would suggest we need to. When you look into it – it’s a report card you would be not keen to take home to your parents.

Sedentary behavior in our youth has skyrocketed past the 75% range and the age that kids are choosing to disengage in sports and outdoor activity is getting younger – rapidly. Non Communicable diseases such as Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, most cancers, the obesity epidemic, and of course the increasing rates of children’s mental health issues are all on the increase in our youth and young adults.

 

This situation passes a huge cost burden onto all modern health care systems and with that their economies. It also makes a mockery of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s) that are the constant talk of the media town and world ‘fix-it’ organizations. Given the current state of the problem, you might think that ways to reverse these trends would be a major goal for societies, and many solutions to these questions would be churning out from the mechanics of our modern-day ‘progress’ machine. Why then, year after year, do see a worsening situation rather than one that is on the upswing and improving?

There seems to be a major disconnect way back at the starting blocks. Modern societies the world over have fallen into the languid thought process that the ‘system’ will take care of providing for our kid’s active and healthy needs. It’s not hard to see that now after 20 years of downward spiralling results, we have fallen asleep at the wheel. The idea, that the youth sports system will provide the pathway for healthy kids, has been modelled on the success of our schooling systems, which on the whole, turns out pretty well-adjusted citizens for society.

There are I know some people that would disagree with me on the efficacy of our general schooling systems however, when you compare the results that nearly all modern-day education systems achieve in general, and then contrast that to the healthy and active status report card for our youth, there is a chasm of difference between the outcomes of the two systems. I don’t think anyone can honestly say that our modern-day sport systems are effectively achieving good macro results by anyone’s measure.

These sports systems we pour endless sums of government-funded taxpayer money into are not fit for purpose and this is a surprise for many, a new paradigm. I have written about this dilemma in another article called Where did my sport go? In this article, I expand on how the entire nature of our sports system has morphed into one claiming to be ‘for the people, with open grassroots development and inclusive sports slogans, but sorely misses the mark. The real-life modern-day sports minefield we are forced to navigate as parents could not be anything further from that.  No, to a country, what is offered in youth sports systems is a transactional model of inaccessibility and exclusive pathways. Where picking the winners is still more important than friends, fun, and fitness.

That the modern-day sports pathways systems are broken may be somewhat of an understatement, and we continue to watch the problem numbers increase the world over. Is the current system repairable?  Albert Einstein is credited to have said – those who created the problem are incapable of coming up with the solution. From my work as a Professional Sports coach and from a Sports Development Sociologists perspective over many years, it has been a 50-year slide into the current ‘Transactional Club/system’ we currently are given to support and participate in.

So, as parents what can we do about it? There is obviously a major disconnect between the goals of our current sports systems and what we want our youth sport development pathways to achieve. To continue this conversation and learn about how you, as a parent, can bring the status of your children’s active and healthy lifestyle back into your own hands, please continue to read part 2 of this post.