Some stuff about children.

"Children born since the 1980s are up to three times more likely than older generations to be overweight or obese by the age of 10. The number of overweight children admitted to hospital has risen from 872 in 2000 to 3,807 in 2009. And over the past decade, the UK has seen a four-fold rise in youngsters needing medical attention as a consequence of being obese."

The above is an extract from this article. 

Whatever poor opinion I might have of Jeremy Hunt, however, I don't think we can blame all the obesity problems on him. Part of it springs from the simple ever-present availability of sweet stuff. Sugar is addictive - they have proved that to be a fact - and it's everywhere. I swear there is a far greater variety of sweets and chocolate bars and biscuits and, of course, fizzy drinks, than there ever were when I was a kid. And mostly we didn't shop in big supermarkets with their aisles full of temptation, tempting mum to buy £1 bags of fruit pastilles, tangy-fruit sweets, mint imperials or whatever it happens to be, just to keep the kids quiet. What's more, although that £1 might be a smaller portion of the family budget than the 3 old pence I used to get to spend when I was eight or nine, you can bet your bottom dollar that the sweets don't always have to last the week like mine had to.

There I go, in grumpy old codger, it wasn't like that in my day mode! So here's a bit more of it: we all used to run around outside a lot more too, further staving off the obesity.

Robert Macfarlane, in one of last weekend's papers bemoaned the fact that children are losing touch with nature. They recognise Pokémon characters more readily than they do plants and trees and flowers. Only a third of eight- to eleven-year-olds in a National Trust survey could identify a magpie but 90% of them could identify a Dalek. The survey quoted was from 2008 so the situation is probably worse now. Adults are no better; of 2000 adults, only half could identify a sparrow, a quarter didn't know a blue tit or a starling. The writer himself admits, "My own children can name a moorhen but nit a collared dove, a blackbird but not a starling. They know oak but not hawthorn, beech but not ash."

It's not all our fault. Around here we don't see many sparrows or starlings, birds that were everywhere in my childhood. You do, however, see so many magpies that the old rhyme about "one for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl and four for a boy" is just irrelevant. What does it mean when they get into double figures?

I suspect that the writer's children see rather more examples of the specimens they can name than those they can't.

Maybe someone should re-introduce the old I Spy books, which encouraged children to roam around looking for examples of whatever the particular I Spy book's theme happened to be. Of course, for that to work children would have to be let off the leash a little and allowed to roam a bit further than the garden gate something which is not going to happen any time soon.

Schools could do their bit too. When I was in junior school t was not uncommon on a fine day for a teacher to decide to take the class on a "nature walk". Off we would go, in a crocodile-type straggle of pairs, to walk to a local park and collect items of interesting specimens of flora and fauna. But of course, as my daughter the primary school teacher would undoubtedly hasten to remind me, the school day (and week, month and year) is much too tightly scheduled to allow such things. Unplanned and unscheduled activities are proscribed! 

Which brings me to this article  about a school in Bradford where the head decided that music should be given priority, indeed music should be involved in just about every lesson in one way or another. All the children learn to play a musical instrument. Everyone sings songs, from all cultures. And if particularly religious parents objected to their children learning about other religions in this way, they were soon convinced of the benefits when their children's test results improved. And besides, surely if a religion is worth anything, it should be able to withstand a bit of comparison with another one (my comment, I hasten to add).

So there we are; that's my take on a few childhood matters.