Fred Bowen's "The Score" column,
May 23, 2008, Washington Post

We Can Do Better Than 'Best'

If you have been reading your Washington Post and KidsPost this week, you know that childhood obesity -- in other words, kids who weigh way too much -- is a big problem in this country.

The statistics are staggering. It is estimated that one-third of kids are overweight or obese. The problem has become much more serious than when your parents were your age. In the early 1970s, about 4 percent of kids ages 6 to 11 were considered obese. Now, almost 20 percent are, according to government reports.

Childhood obesity can cause heart disease, diabetes and other physical conditions that make doing even simple things, such as playing games or climbing stairs, harder. Weighing too much also can shorten a person's life.

For the United States to successfully tackle the problem of childhood obesity, kids and their parents are going to have to do some simple things:

First, eat better. That means more vegetables and fruit, and fewer sweets and junk food. American kids are drinking about four times as much soda as they did 20 years ago. Many teens average four sodas a day. That's crazy. No one needs that much soda. Kids should drink more water or milk.

Get more active. Kids need to turn off the television and their computer games. According to a Kaiser Family Foundation study, kids ages 8 to 18 average more than six hours each day watching TV, playing video games and using computers for fun. Kids spend more time parked in front of a screen than doing anything else other than sleeping.

Because I'm a sports guy, I'll add one more thing that everybody -- kids and adults -- should do to help combat childhood obesity: Change our attitude toward kids sports.

Now, almost all kids try some kind of sport. But very quickly, lots of them stop playing. Why?

Part of the problem is that we spend so much time identifying the "best" kids in each sport -- for travel and all-star teams and, later, high school teams -- that the other kids get the message that they should either go home or be content to watch the "best" kids play.

We need to rethink this approach. Success in sports is when millions of kids are playing pickup basketball or soccer or ultimate Frisbee in a park, not when they are watching high-paid superstars on TV.

Getting more and more kids to take part should be the goal of our sports leagues and teams. If we can accomplish that, maybe more kids will learn to love playing sports and be on track for a healthier lifestyle.

Fred Bowen writes KidsPost's sports opinion column and is an author of sports novels for kids.

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