Seeing this picture of these two adorable children completely passive but thoroughly engaged in media made me very sad.    I want to see them running outside, exploring nature, flying kites, looking for bugs, anything but being mesmorized by a tv screen.

Because we did not even have a tv set as I was growing up,  my memories of childhood were all outside, spending time with friends, playing games like “kick the can” and exploring the neighborhood.  Staying in the house was a punishment for us, not an everyday occurance.

A recent study published in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine revealed some disturbing facts about toddlers and tv exposure.  “We found every additional hour of TV exposure among toddlers corresponded to a future decrease in classroom engagement and success at math,  increased victimization by classmates,  have a more sedentary lifestyle, higher consumption of junk food and, ultimately, higher body mass index,” says lead author Dr. Linda S. Pagani, a psychosocial professor at the Universite de Montreal and researcher at the Sainte-Justine University Hospital Research Center.

Another study which followed almost 2000 high school kids and their TV viewing times, found that those students who watched too much TV are much more likely to develop bad eating habits in their future.  Dr Daheia Barr-Anderson worked with a team of researchers from the University of Minnesota to investigate this relationship between television and diet. She said, “To our knowledge, this is the first study to examine the association between television viewing and diet over the transition from adolescence into young adulthood. We’ve shown that TV viewing during adolescence predicts poorer dietary intake patterns five years later”.

Unfortunately, statistics now show that one-third of all of the kids in this country are either overweight or obese.   This can have a devasting effect on how kids feel about themselves.    Michelle Obama’s nationwide campaign, Let’s Move, is certainly a good place to start when it stresses finding new ways to help our kids stay physically active in school and at home.

Perhaps, as parents and grandparents, we all need to remove ourselves from in front of the tv set and spend more time  experiencing that outside world because staying fit, even for the very young, apparently can make a big difference in our overall health.

What does your family do for recreation?  Would love to hear your comments about this.