Be Active, Sit Less, Build Strength, Improve Balance
From Now
inside excellent life
Child care providers often dread those days when the weather is bad and the children can’t get outdoors to play. But children need to have active times every day to use up energy, learn new things, and be healthy. Luckily, active play can happen indoors as well as outdoors. With a little imagination and creativity, child care providers can come up with activities that use large muscles and burn energy, but can be done indoors. Here are some ideas to try:
Active play is an essential part of young children’s lives. Effective child care programs give children ways to be active indoors as well as outside. With imagination and creativity, you can come up with other fun ideas for active play.
(Some ideas from eXtension.org)
Often to explain the high percentage of young Italian sedentary it’s said that it’s the fault of the school that does not promote program of physical activity, not by stimulating their participation in the world of sports. Certainly this is one of the explanations of the reduced athletic involvement of adolescents. But there is another important issue to keep in mind and directly affects families. Let’s just say that most of the Italian families do not conduct a lifestyle physically active, even adults aged 25 to 65 years practice rarely sport and are often overweight:
Many of these adults are parents and their daily example teachto their children their own life style. So it is not a coincidence that, in Italy, the peak of sporting activities for girls is around 11 years while for boys to 14 years. In the following ages abandoning sports is a constant, characterizing the rest of adolescence and early adulthood.
I heard that instead we should be glad, because these percentages indicate a considerable increase of the sport of adults and young people in the last 30 years. This reasoning is wrong, however, because at that time the adults were much more physically active because they walked more often and for longer distances and the obesity had not yet become a national health problem. Moreover, even if the young at school did little physical activity, they could play in the street and go to the oratory and this made them more active. And they were not chased by parents with their snacks. Today this is impossible, there is no more free and spontaneous play, and there are other forms of entertainment that take them away from the sport.
Finally, the parents are a decisive issue for the development of a physically active lifestyle and they should be sensitized and helped to make the right choices for themselves and for their children.