Kudos to Nickelodeon

[ArmorOfGod]

The Nickelodeon channel will go off the air for three hours Saturday to encourage our fat little children to get off their butts and play outside (something that is not done anymore).
Of course, many kids will just flip to Cartoon Network, but I am very impressed with Nick.
They did a reality show a few months ago showing obese 10 year olds who couldn't even ride a bike and other activitites and challenged them to lose weight and eat better.
Again, good work Nick. I have always been a fan of the channel (I love my Spongebob) and this just reinforces that.

AoG

 

[ArmorOfGod]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21022321/

BTW, there's the link.

AoG

 

[lkblair]

My kids' school district sponsored activities at area parks this morning; we went out and had a blast! Now the tv is on, naturally, as the kids are vegging out and hopefully going to take a nap before heading to the pool later. But it was a great morning, and a fine change of pace from the usual Saturday cartoon couch potatoes.

A bit OT, but my kids can't ride their bikes w/o training wheels (ages 7, 5, and 3). This is mostly due to an inept mother that doesn't have a clue how to teach them to keep their balance. Any tips?

Lisa

 

[Sukerkin]

Lisa, I'm afraid that the only method that really works when learning to ride a bike is to fall off. After a while, that stops happening.

A small help is to walk alongside and catch them when the fall occurs but it's far more effective to let nature take it's course.

 

[exile]

Two points, one on the off topic and then one to get back on topic :wink1:

So far as learning to ride a bike... when I was first learning, I tried on a `full-sized' bike, and I was dead hopeless. I tried for weeks, maybe months... I was 6 years old, so memories are a bit hazy. But despite everyone's best efforts, I was an abject failure; that much, I remember!

One or the other of my parents had the inspired thought to buy me a bike half the size of the bike I was trying to learn on. I was quite tall for my age, so this would have beeen a bike appropriate for maybe an average-sized four year old. With something that small, it's difficult not to learn balance skills pretty quickly, and I did. After two weeks on that bike, I climbed onto the `full'-sized bike and rode like a champ without the slightest loss of balance.

I remembered this lesson many years later as a downhill ski instructor trying to get students to roll their knees into the radius of the turn while shifting their weight to the outside ski to set up the next short-radius turn. It's a very tricky skill, but crucial to effective parallel turning (not to mention race technique). At my ski school, we started all students older than about 13 years old on 180 cm. skis and worked them up to just under `full-length'. It wasn't approved, certified Graduated Length Method, but we got them carving beautiful parallel turns in two lessons or less that way, and they developed impeccable technique even after progressing up to 205 cm skis. One day, while I was marvelling to myself how great a job we were doing there, the memory of my own bike-learning experience came back to me all at once, and I suddenly understood why our method worked so well...

Now for the on-topic part: obese kids. I spent the day at a huge air show at Rickenbacker Field in Columbus, with the Air Force demo team, the Thunderbirds, performing outrageous aviation feats in their F-16s... don't get me started on that, or we will be really off-topic... but the point was, as depressing as the obsesity problem with the adults was, what I saw of the kids there was almost heartbreking. There were dozens of kids under 10, no exaggeration, who you could see the writing on the wall for twenty-five years up the line: major blood-pressure problems, cholestorol monitoring every six weeks, borderline diabetes, dangerous heart conditions... People aren't getting it. Up to the middle of the 20th century, we had a relatively lean population. The next couple of generations showed an alarming increase in adult obsesity related health-problems. And now we're seeing it in progressively lower ages. I saw not just fat but morbidly obese pre-teens all over the place today... a day is coming when many young adults will simply not be able to get health insurance at any price, because the insurance companies will look at their mandatory fitness profiles and decide that they just aren't worth the risk.

I don't know how effective Nickelodeon's gesture will be, but it's great publicity for a very scary problem that could be easily solved if people only did a bit more physical activity on a daily basis... like, e.g., martial arts... eh?

 

[seninoniwashi]

The Nickelodeon channel will go off the air for three hours Saturday to encourage our fat little children to get off their butts and play outside (something that is not done anymore).
Of course, many kids will just flip to Cartoon Network, but I am very impressed with Nick.
They did a reality show a few months ago showing obese 10 year olds who couldn't even ride a bike and other activitites and challenged them to lose weight and eat better.
Again, good work Nick. I have always been a fan of the channel (I love my Spongebob) and this just reinforces that.

AoG

That's awesome. I agree - kudos to nickelodeon!

 

[Kennedy_Shogen_Ryu]

I find it ironic that so many people talk about obesity among children but are unwilling to actually do anything about it. Kudos to anyone who's willing to pull kids up off the couch and get them physical!
​

 

[exile]

I find it ironic that so many people talk about obesity among children but are unwilling to actually do anything about it.
​

I'm not so sure it's ironic, exactly. For a lot of people, talking about a problem is an acceptable substitute for action; or maybe, for them it counts as a kind of action that will magically make the problem go away. It's not that different from the favorite technique in the politics of democracies: once a problem has been identified as urgent... form a committee to study it. This has the double advantage of moving the need to really do something about it into the indefinite future, while making the electorate feel happier, as though something were really being done right now. I think an awful lot of us operate in much the same way in our ordinary personal lives.... especially when the problem is difficult and systemic.