Physical illiteracy

Despite the dangers, our kids' fitness is at an all-time worst

For the long-term, the greatest threat to our society is not al-Qaeda and it is not North Korea and it is not Iraq. It is the way we choose to live. How much we choose to sit, how much we choose to eat. We're supposed to be such a sports-loving society, but, in fact, fewer and fewer of us are playing sports, while the rest are content to just watch. Our children are even more inactive than we are. Researchers believe that the generation currently in school will be the first in American history to have a shorter lifespan than its parents.

Dr. Frank Booth, a physiologist at the University of Missouri, has even given a name to what is killing so many of us: Sedentary Death Syndrome -- SeDS. For all we attend to the threat from abroad, we're not doing nearly enough to protect us from ourselves, from our indulgences and our sloth. Our children are at risk of an epidemic no less than what they suffered in the past from diphtheria or typhoid or polio, only this illness is not nearly as dramatic, so hardly anybody is raising money to fight it.

That's because this epidemic is just called ... fatness. As many as one-quarter of our children are obese -- a number that's doubled in the last decade. And conditions generally associated with obesity and inactivity, such as diabetes, and cardiovascular disease and attention deficit disorder, are rapidly increasing.

Our kids are simply not exercising enough. What games they play are video, sitting on their big bottoms. Only a quarter of American children get so much as an accepted minimum of physical activity. And while we continue to spend billions of dollars on sports -- much of it at schools and colleges -- funding for physical education plummets. The best estimates are that today half of all students and three-quarters of high school students receive no physical education whatsoever. In America, P.E. has become P.I. -- physical illiteracy.

Part of the reason for this is choice. As more and more states require students to take standardized tests in various academic subjects, money and time are taken from physical education so children can learn better how to take such tests. Subjects like music and art are also being sacrificed on the altar of test-taking. Might it be worth remembering that Socrates said the two main keys to a young person's development are the fine arts and athletics.

In fact, we know that healthy, active bodies encourage clearer thinking. Kids would probably do better on those standardized tests if they had more physical education. It is ironic, too, that because so many of our best athletes are African- or Hispanic-American, an illusion is created. The fact is that the amount of P.E. a child receives is very much a function of class, and poorer minority children tend to be in even worse shape than those children of the soccer moms in the suburbs, where funding for P.E. has not been cut so badly.

Of course, this is not to say that kids themselves don't understand what they're missing. This is why more and more adolescent boys who have grown up fat and inactive have now started to use steroids or other drugs to make themselves look buff and athletic. But, then, that's another epidemic.

Sports Illustrated senior contributing writer Frank Deford is a regular contributor to SI.com and appears each Wednesday on National Public Radio's Morning Edition. He is a longtime correspondent for HBO's Real Sports and his new novel, An American Summer (Sourcebooks Trade), is available now at bookstores everywhere.

 

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