Sending the Kids Back to an Active Lifestyle is More Important than Sending Them Back to School

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A girl reclines on a couch with a book
Photo by Josh Applegate on Unsplash

Get them moving. Now. 

Lockdown, isolation, social distancing…whatever you practiced between March and September, I’m willing to bet your kids aren’t as fit as they were.

From a global perspective, “prolonged home stay may lead to increased sedentary behaviours, such as spending excessive amounts of time sitting, reclining, or lying down.” Of course it did. 

We got far less auxiliary exercise (the steps I didn’t take to bring the dog to the dog park, or even meet the kids at the bus stop across the street; the stairs you didn’t climb up onto the top deck of the bus, the steps you didn’t take to transfer tube lines or grab a coffee from the shop at lunchtime). All of these added up during a normal, pre-lockdown day. And there we were without them, for almost six months.

Now, what about the kids? Kids move a lot, far more than the average adult. They’re supposed to.

Let me be clear: I’m not advocating for shaming kids for their perfectly-understandable, lowered fitness levels, or for pushing kids so hard that they get injured; I understand that they can’t just jump back into the pre-pandemic levels of activity, especially those that didn’t have a (cruel yet creative) mom. Most parents, while juggling working from home and home schooling, didn’t have the luxury (or patience, knowhow and inherent evilness, all important attributes for personal trainers) to coach their kids to move and stretch so much.

Read the whole article at Medium.com:

Is “Easing Back In” the Best Way to Go?

My kids have had more screen time since March than they have ever had in their lives. Cumulatively. Like, the time they have spent on screens between March and last week outweighs allll of the screentime they have ever had in their 7, 10 and 11 years, respectively.

Oh, and read this one, too.

“I Don’t Need Anyone Pressuring Me to Work Out Right Now”

Remember when that photo of Adele went viral? A beautiful, incredibly-talented, successful woman and mother lost a lot of weight, and it broke the internet. People that have praised her new look have been vilified, because they must be celebrating looks and the diet culture over talent, are completely invalidating the rest of her accomplishments, and “skinny doesn’t necessarily mean healthy”.

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