Kids don't walk to school anymore

I read an article on Tuesday in one of those publications that they hand to you when you get off the subway... You know, the kind you grab when the headline is ridiculous enough to amuse you into reading it, or it's raining out and you need an umbrella-of-sorts to cover your coif. Well, an article about fat kids spotted my eye, and it said that some study has concluded that children walk less now than they did before. So all that stuff that your parents have said about how, back in the day, it was so much harder for them, and how they had to walk 6 miles uphill both ways to get to school, apparently, is true. Well, sort of true.

Kids these days are getting less and less physical exercise. Whereas before there was some passive opportunity for physical activity in walking to and from school, kids are being driven door to door, and encouraged to stay indoors once they get to where they're going. Parents are reporting that it's just easier to drop their kids off on their way to work. It's also perceived to be safer, as parents are increasingly concerned about violence, accidents, and disasters that can occur while walking down the street, especially in the cities.

So with the decrease in the number of children who walk to school, and the decrease in physical education programs and funding within the school system, America's kids are becoming more and more sedentary as the prevalence of childhood obesity rises.

Good thing there are foundations out there like Team for Kids working to provide cities like New York with something for these kids to do... like running.