Some publishing houses are to start “age banding” their children’s books later this year.

Each book will carry a specific marking indicating whether they are suitable for readers aged 5+, 7+, 9+, 11+ and 13+/teen.

Research within the book industry suggests people buying books for children would welcome the guidance.

But it is a scheme which has already enraged a number of writers, leading to the creation of a website to protest against the plans.

Here are the opposing arguments.

The branding (for that is what it is) of every children’s book with an irremovable age suggestion is an idea that could only spring from people with no knowledge of children and little idea of how a reader is born.

Children read up and read down. They read over and over again. They read the same book at two different ages and get something totally different out of the experience each time.

They identify with characters who are older, and with those who are younger - the reason authors go to such trouble not to pin ages onto their characters.

Children differ. Some race ahead with interests and reading skills. Why should they be held back because, at eight, they want to read something that might be marked 11+? (”Are you sure that’s not too old for you, dear?”)

Why should the child of eight who struggles with dyslexia, or has English as a second language, or learning difficulties of any sort (and they are legion) struggle to the end of a book and feel their sense of achievement turn to humiliation as they see 5+ on the back?

This is why nearly 1,000 authors and illustrators have already shown their disapproval by signing up to www.notoagebanding.org, and over 2,000 professionally interested people are among the thousands who have also signed up to support them.

These are not stickers. They are clearly printed numbers. Children are taught to study covers. Age guidance is readily available already. This is merely a stupid, cruel idea invented by some marketing maven who thinks only of the convenience of supermarket shelf stackers and nothing of the way in which children come to books.

And it’s commercial suicide. If the British publishing industry were looking for the very best way to kill the goose that lays their golden eggs, this would be it.

Source: BBC News, UK
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7571152.stm

Although a good night’s sleep and a healthy breakfast can prepare your child for a day of learning, experts are finding other smart ways to beef up the brain.

“Neuro-science is growing so much because of new technologies,” says chartered psychologist Deb Skaret.

“We’re finding that there are lots of things that parents can do to help facilitate the health and overall intellectual development and curiosity of their children.”

Skaret, who holds a PhD in educational psychology from the University of Alberta, has long been a student of the brain and cites the latest research into how exercise benefits the muscle between your ears.

“We’re learning how exercise is critical for brain development. It’s like a spark,” she says, adding that lack of physical activity can be connected to children with attention problems. She says American physician John J. Ratey tested junior high school students by running them on a treadmill before morning classes and found they were more alert in school.

Scientific research shows that exercise increases the fitness level and development of brain cells, and benefits the hippocampus (a seahorse-shaped brain structure) which is vital for memory and learning.

“I’m concerned about a child playing a lot of computer games and not having a balanced, recreational lifestyle. It’s just a hypothesis, but I think we’ll see greater challenges with kids holding down a conversation in the classroom. They’re used to flashy stuff, and maybe it will be hard to sit down and enjoy a book,” says Skaret, who jokes that the thumbs of future generations will be longer because of increased video games use.

Parents should encourage a balance of recreational activities and limit time on computer games, encouraging interaction and conversation with others.

Skaret also recommends parents monitor stressors in their children’s lives.

“A little bit of stress is good. Hey, you got an assignment due, nothing like stress to help you get it done. But chronic stress, such as family fighting, and you get a child with constant anxiety,” she says.

“Chronic stress creates cortisol which inhibits memory. If a child is sitting in school worrying, they can’t concentrate or they learn something and it just falls through.”

Cutting edge research still touts the benefits of sleep and adequate nutrition.

“Basically, when your brain doesn’t have the nourishment it needs, you’re foggy and fatigued. It’s hard to stay focused,” says nutrition specialist Theresa Riege of the Calgary Health Region.

Riege stresses the importance of a breakfast that is a combination of several food groups, particularly protein and whole grains, which will take longer to digest and help students keep their energy level up throughout the morning.

“Avoid that sweet sugar rush in the morning. It will get them going faster, but they’ll lack energy by mid-morning and will inhibit their function from a thinking, and even play, perspective.”

The Calgary Health Region, Nutrition and Active Living, has published a school nutrition guide book for schools, teachers and parents which is available on their website at http://www.calgaryhealthregion.ca/programs/nutrition/services/school nutrition.htm.

“It will give parents some food options and outlines some strategies for packing lunches and snacks,” says Riege.

Source: Calgary Herald, Canada
http://tinyurl.com/5vsjd6

Facebook makes Mom and Dad kids’ mentors, spies and friends

Julia McGovern was shocked when her mom sent her a “friend” request on Facebook. She had been on the social-networking site for four years and had no idea her mother even knew what it was.

“It was my world,” says Julia, 18, of Hopkinton, Mass. “She was still just e-mailing.”

Not anymore. Parents are flocking to social-networking sites – sometimes to monitor their kids, and sometimes for the same reason teenagers signed up: to communicate and to share.

For some teens, this can feel like an intrusion on their virtual space. For others, it’s just a new way to stay in touch with mom and dad. It depends, experts say, on how well parents and kids communicate, online and off.

In general, teenagers are closer to their parents today than in previous generations, says Nancy Robinson, consumer strategist for Iconoculture, a cultural trends research firm in Minneapolis. Kids today often prefer hanging out with their parents to being holed up in their room, she says.

That can easily extend to social-networking sites, which – after texting – are the No. 2 way that teens communicate technologically, according to Don Tapscott, author of Growing Up Digital (1997) and the upcoming Grown Up Digital (both from McGraw-Hill Professional).

Dylan Akers, 17, of Cambridge, Mass., invited his mom, Carolyn Bailey, to join Facebook and helped set up her page. Bailey, 46, a health and fitness counselor, says she has had more conversations on Facebook with her son’s friends than with him.

“I think everybody views my mom as a cool mom,” Dylan says. “I’m pretty open with her about my life. I don’t have to be too careful. Whatever I put on there, I wouldn’t mind her knowing.”

Many parents believe they need to monitor their kids online. Some limit their teenagers’ online exposure to strangers by using the sites’ stricter privacy settings.

Rod Carveth, 53, of New Britain, Conn., made his teenage daughter include him as a friend when she signed up for MySpace and Facebook. He wanted to make sure she wasn’t posting anything inappropriate or revealing too much personal information.

He has had to ask her to remove messages that contained vulgar language.

“It started mostly as a check,” says Carveth, an instructor at the University of Hartford, whose daughter is now 16. “Since then, it has evolved to where I will leave messages, ‘Have a nice day. Don’t forget to do this.’ That kind of thing. And she’s responded to me as well.”

Some experts warn that parents who “friend” their kids without being invited to can send the teens a message that they don’t trust them. Michael Solomon, a professor of marketing at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, says teens who post suggestive photos or inappropriate messages will block their parents from accessing the information anyway.

“It can backfire,” Solomon says. “It can embarrass the kids and their friends and create resentment.”

Anastasia Goodstein, author of Totally Wired: What Teens and Tweens Are Really Doing Online (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2007), believes parents should keep a discreet distance on social-networking sites.

“I do think it can bring them closer together” by helping parents learn more about their children’s interests and friends, she says. “Where it gets tricky is, what’s happening on social-networking sites is really conversations between teens and their friends. You’re not just listening in on your own teen. Suddenly, you are hearing what all their friends are doing as well.”

Goodstein sees these sites as the new mall, a place where teenagers can hang out without authority figures.

Adults also should remember that teenagers are watching them back.

Liz Funk, 19, a senior at Pace University in New York City, says it was strange to see one of her high school teachers send a drink to another on Facebook.

Funk, who blogs about tween and teen girls, adds, “I really can’t recommend that parents get accounts for the sole purpose of monitoring their children. I think what’s more important is parents need to engage their kids in dialogue about what is and what isn’t appropriate to be posted online.”

Jeff Berman, president of sales and marketing for MySpace, says most parents are pursuing their own interests on the site, not just watching the kids.

“Other than the front door you come through at MySpace.com, you might never see the same content or have the same experience,” he says. “You might be on MySpace just to discover great music, share it with your friends. Your mom might be on MySpace to share photos and to blog, and never the two shall meet.”

At Facebook, which was originally created for college students, the number of users ages 35 to 54 more than tripled in the 12 months ending in July, according to the site’s survey of 3,100 users. The 13-34 age group doubled, and the number of users ages 65 and older grew by 150 percent.

Kel Kelly, 45, Julia McGovern’s mom, says she didn’t join Facebook to spy on her daughter or be part of her crowd. She doesn’t friend her daughter’s friends, and if one of them friends her, she makes sure to tell their parents.

Sometimes she sees photos or messages she doesn’t like, but she doesn’t intervene unless it’s something dangerous.

Julia says her mom never crosses the line.

“It’s become an easy way to interact with her, to keep her in my life,” says Julia, who is heading to Syracuse University in the fall and plans to use the site to keep in touch with mom. “It will be a lot easier than making phone calls.”

Source: Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, IN
http://www.journalgazette.net/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080812/FEAT/808120371

For many adolescents, “screen time” is almost a full-time job that could lead to obesity, diabetes and other health issues, a Canadian researcher says.

Adolescents now spend an average of six hours a day in front of some type of screen, whether it’s a television or computer screen or one of the many portable devices now popular with young people, studies done by Dr. Ian Michael Janssen show. “They spend more hours daily in front of a screen than they do in a classroom in a given year,” said Janssen, a researcher at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada, who is funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

Even if they are still playing with friends, children are increasingly likely to be engaging in more passive activities like playing video games, one reason why only half of Canadian children aged 5 to 17 get as much physical activity as they should each day, according to the Health and Stroke Foundation.

The result is a rise in obesity rates among adolescents. Twenty-six percent of Canadian children are overweight or obese, according to a government health committee report, representing a 15-percent increase over 30 years. In the United States, the obesity rates for preschool-aged children and adolescents has more than doubled over that time period, and more than tripled for children aged 6-11.

Unfortunately, fixing the problem isn’t as easy as simply cutting down screen time, Janssen cautions. While a sedentary lifestyle has been associated with childhood obesity, as reported in the Canadian Medical Association journal, Janssen says that physical activity and screen time are separate behaviors in children.

“Decreasing screen time will not automatically increase physical activity levels,” said Janssen, whose research examines how the two are related and what effects screen time may have above and beyond those on physical activity. Some active kids also spend a lot of time in front of television and computer screens, and some kids who have low screen times also have low levels of physical activity, he points out.

The long-term risk for children is that behaviors and health outcomes tend to track over time, Janssen said. “An obese youth is very likely to become an obese adult.” And because obesity-related health problems take time to develop, the longer a person has been obese, the worse off they’re likely to be. A 50-year-old who only recently became obese is in a better position than one who has been obese since childhood, he said.

Janssen’s real worry about the rise in childhood obesity rates is not that there are now rare cases of type 2 diabetes in kids, where once there were none, but the health problems these children are likely to face in the future as adults, including high blood pressure, high cholesterol and cardiovascular disease. When today’s obese children are adults, baby boomers will all be seniors, he pointed out, placing a huge burden on the health care system. “That’s when I’m really frightened.”

Source: Reuters
http://features.us.reuters.com/wellbeing/news/FD5592F0-64B8-11DD-AA35-6CC02BCD.html

We soon will experience the most important time in the entire school year for children: the first two weeks. What happens during this critical period pretty much determines how the rest of the year will go.

When children return to school after the summer break, their perceptions about school and themselves as learners are mostly uncertain. It’s a new year with new teachers, new books, new classes, new schedules and new friends. All of these new things come with the hope that this year could be different and better than all previous years.

That uncertainty in students’ perceptions continues only until teachers administer the first quizzes and tests near the end of the second week of school. When teachers assign grades to those first quizzes, the grades put students into categories. And getting out of a category is really difficult.

Students who receive a C on that first math quiz, for example, begin to see themselves as C students. Their uncertainty suddenly becomes fixed, and they accept the idea that they are likely to earn Cs in math for the rest of the school year.

When the second quiz or test occurs, they expect to receive another C. When they do, it reinforces their perception. Similarly, if they receive a failing grade on that first quiz, they think all following grades will be the same.

But if they succeed on that first quiz and receive a high grade, that, too, is their perception of all that might follow.

This means that teachers must do everything they can to ensure students’ success in the first two weeks. And not fake success, but success in something challenging. The key to motivating students rests with that success. Students persist in activities at which they experience success, and they avoid activities at which they are not successful or believe they cannot be successful.

This is the reason that truancy and attendance problems rarely occur during the first two weeks of the school year. They begin to occur after the first graded quizzes and tests. In students’ minds, the grades they receive on these first quizzes establish their likelihood of future success. And why come to school if there is so little chance of doing well?

Parents, too, must be genuinely involved in their children’s education during the first two weeks. Routines established at home in this critical period profoundly affect the likelihood of success.

Daily conversations about school activities help children recognize that their parents value success in school. Providing a quiet place for children to work on school assignments and limiting the time they spend watching TV or playing on computers further increase chances for success. Checking with teachers to make sure children are well prepared and ready to succeed also can help.

Successful experiences during the first two weeks of school do not guarantee success for the entire year. But they are a powerful and perhaps essential step in that direction.

Teachers and parents need to take advantage of this critical time and use it well. It can make all the difference.

Source: Kentucky.com, KY
http://www.kentucky.com/589/story/478728.html

My 9-year-old son recently declared that he wanted to get rid of his little-kid toys.

For years, our house has been cluttered with hundreds of small objects scattered about by my son.

Picking them up, and using all kinds of incentives and/or punishments to get him to collect them, has been mostly a losing battle.

“Don’t worry,” our friends told us. “It won’t always be like this. He’ll lose interest in all those toys and he’ll have just a few things.”

Well, it finally happened. My son announced the big decision and my wife, a dedicated if not entirely successful anti-clutter activist, was thrilled. We put the air conditioner on high and spent hours sorting through all his stuff.

It was a sad moment. Another vestige of his early childhood was going the way of the, well, dinosaur (he tossed many of those in the giveaway bin). But with all that space suddenly opened up, it was hard to stay gloomy for long.

He said good-bye to hundreds of little cars and blocks and dozens of plastic animals and dragons. The most surprising things he dumped were his Legos, which were his favorite toy until a few months ago.

He announced, “I’m too old to play with Legos.”

Only a few were spared. “These are cooler than the other ones,” he said, holding a few cylinder-shaped attachments. “They hold more weaponry.”

That was a little out of character, given that my son is generally a pacifist, even if he does like watching the Military Channel. But who could argue?

Finally, he revealed the real motivation for the purge. It gave me a jolt, because it shows he’s seriously anticipating the new demands placed on a fourth-grader.

“I need more space on my desk to do homework,” he said.

Indeed, the top of his desk is now cleared off and ready for action. The Legos went to a friend who still plays with them, and other bins went to a grateful new mom.

Now, my son says, his play will focus on a few areas. He has three Nintendo game players and he’s begun organizing his Yu-Gi-Oh! cards, his Pokemon cards and his baseball cards.

We have yet to trip over those. And they don’t get stuck in the vacuum.

Source: The Star-Ledger - NJ.com, NJ
http://blog.nj.com/parentalguidance/2008/07/my_tweener_son_gets_rid_of_his.html

Despite the fact that pediatricians recommend no screen media exposure for children under age 2, three-quarters of very young children in America live in homes where the television is on most of the time, according to research. A new study has found that leaving your TV set on disrupts young children while they are playing, even if the channel is tuned to adult shows. This means that simply having the TV on, even in the background, may be detrimental to children’s development.

The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Massachusetts, is published in the July/August 2008 issue of the journal Child Development.

The researchers looked at 50 children ages 1, 2, and 3. Each child came to a lab with a parent and was invited to play for an hour with a variety of age-appropriate toys. For half the time, a television was on in the room, showing an episode of the adult game show Jeopardy!, with commercials; during the other half hour, the TV was turned off.

Researchers observed the children as they played to determine whether background TV—defined as adult-oriented television that is on and may be watched by older members of the family, but which very young children don’t understand and to which they pay little attention—affected the children’s behavior during play.

Background TV was found to disrupt the toy play of the children at every age, even when they paid little attention to it. When the television was on, the children played for significantly shorter periods of time and the time they spent focused on their play was shorter, compared to when the TV was off.

“Background TV, as an ever-changing audiovisual distractor, disrupts children’s efforts to sustain attention to ongoing play behaviors,” according to Marie Evans Schmidt, who is now a research associate at the Center on Media and Child Health at Children’s Hospital Boston and is the lead author of the study. “Background TV is potentially a chronic environmental risk factor affecting most American children. Parents should limit their young children’s exposure to background television.”

Source: EurekAlert, DC
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-07/sfri-psl070808.php

If you were an energetic nine-year-old boy who loved school, did your best but also loved charging about, trying to beat your friends at every game possible, imagine the hell of our currrent state school system where ball games are banned from the playground in case someone gets hurt, there is no outside play in bad weather and you are constantly in trouble for being too competitive because winning is not what it’s about. And, worse, Jamie Oliver fruit smoothies have replaced sponge pudding in your school dinner, so you’re starving by two o’clock.

Sue Palmer is a former head teacher, literacy adviser and the author of 21st Century Boys. She says it is a biological necessity that boys run about, take risks, swing off things and compete with each other to develop properly. “If they can’t, a lot of them find it impossible to sit still, focus on a book or wield a pencil,” she says, “so their behaviour is considered ‘difficult’, they get into trouble and tumble into a cycle of school failure.”

Boys are three times as likely as girls to need extra help with reading at primary school, and 75 per cent of children supposedly suffering from ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) are male. “We are losing boys at a rate of knots, particularly in literacy,” Palmer says, “because at some point in the past 30 years, masculinity became an embarrassment.”

Research by Simon Baron-Cohen, a respected Cambridge professor, that began as an investigation into autism, puts a solid case for biological male/female differences in the brain, with boys tending to be “systematisers” and girls “empathisers”. This explains why boys generally are less keen on reading and comprehension, and lag behind girls in literacy. A lot of boys find it easier to explain the workings of a watch than to discuss how a character in a story is feeling. “But now,” says Palmer, “apart from the very bright ones, boys aren’t even doing better at maths and science.”

Some people blame this nosedive, first noticed in the mid-Nineties, on the “feminisation” of education - too many women teachers, girl-friendly classroom environments and modular exam systems that suit girls’ study skills but disadvantage risk-takers. “Geniuses are much more likely to be male,” Palmer says, “but if you don’t tick the right boxes, you fail.”

There are seven times as many women primary school teachers as men, but Christine Skelton, Professor of Gender Equality in Education at Birmingham University, argues that there have always been far more female teachers than male. “Obviously there are some women who understand active boys, and some men who don’t, just as there are energetic girls and inactive boys,” she says.

The current generation of teachers, though, were born and raised in an atmosphere dominated by women’s liberation and “non-gender-specific” education that began in the Seventies. Barbies were banned, most protagonists in books were female and there was no tolerance of war or superhero play. As a head teacher, Palmer remembers making her reception teacher remove all the cloakroom pegs that depicted tractors for boys and bunnies for girls.

“The belief was that you were shaped by your environment, and it was the teacher’s responsibility to ‘socialise’ boys away from their natural inclinations and to encourage girls to study traditionally male subjects such as physics and technology,” she says.

Palmer would never deny that some of it was absolutely necessary - but with movements such as Reclaim the Night, Greenham Common and Gay Pride, groups that offered an alternative perspective to the traditionally dominant male view taking centre stage, masculinity became suspect. “I really think,” she says, “that the almighty cock-up of the sisterhood in the Seventies was that we believed we could turn boys into girls.”

Palmer says that most women are not natural risk-takers, so for teachers who have not helped to bring up brothers and who don’t have sons, boys’ behaviour can be frightening. “Play-fighting, for example, reaches a peak at age 7 or 8 but is not actually aggressive,” she says. “It’s social - it’s the way boys get to know each other and see how the other one ticks. A lot of women teachers are horrified when I suggest that they should let boys get on with fighting and shouting because eventually they’ll come out the other side and start negotiating.”

Another problem for boys seeking adventure is that, because we live in an increasingly risk-averse society, children are rarely allowed to play unsupervised. When did you last see a group of boys climbing a tree?

“There is a rational fear of increased traffic but also an irrational fear of stranger danger, fanned by media reporting of child abduction,” says Palmer. “Parents are worried about being considered irresponsible, so they never let their children out of their sight.” And because we are not used to seeing boys playing outside, when we do it feels hostile even when what is going on is not particularly boisterous.

Dan Travis, a sports coach, argues that it is very important for boys to muck about on their own. “Coaching is formal and necessary but should only take up 20 per cent of the time they play,” he says. “The informal 80 per cent is where most of the learning and practising occurs - away from adult supervision.”

Travis is running a campaign to bring competition back to school sport. “The Sport for All ethos took hold in the Seventies and never let go,” he says. “Games are only about inclusion, with no winners allowed.” This is disastrous for boys, who need to compete to establish their place in the hierarchy, which is how they organise their friendships and something that they understand from nursery age onwards. It is also bad for sport. Palmer adds that “self-esteem” arrived from America and now no child is allowed to “lose” at anything.

Palmer is not suggesting that boys should be allowed to behave in any way they want. What we need, she says, is to celebrate what makes them boys and help them to understand the things that don’t come naturally to them. That means getting them outside more, particularly as space gets squeezed in urban schools. “Not letting boys be boys is not only detrimental to them but also to girls, many of whom become overcompliant with what is considered ‘good’ behaviour and could do with a shove outdoors to take more risks,” she says. “I certainly wish that had happened to me.”

Palmer is especially enthusiastic about the few “outdoor nurseries” that we have in this country, and about the Scandinavian system that puts off formal learning until the age of 7 or 8, concentrating instead on playing outside and the development of social skills.

In the ideal Palmer world, everyone would go to a Scandinavian-style school. What we are doing instead is bringing in the Early Years Foundation Stage, a new government framework that becomes law in September. It says that by the age of 5 children should be writing sentences, some of which are punctuated. “That would be impressive for a seven-year-old,” says Palmer. “So rather than tackling the imbalance in the way that we have treated boys for too long, we are going to make them sit still and learn even younger. I’d call that little short of state-sponsored child abuse.”

21st Century Boys will be published by Orion in early 2009

Source: Times Online, UK
http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/families/article4288100.ece

I can’t believe what I just read. We are going to spend millions for our teachers to teach our children how to be lazier.

The question was, “How do you solve the turkey problem if you are a third grader who doesn’t know how to multiply?”

If the kids are really supposed to stretch their math muscles, you teach them the multiplication tables in the second grade. Are our children as smart as we were? A teacher told me they are not. They sit in the classroom and will not listen, will not work, and will not try. This is not a learning problem, this is a parental problem.

Out with the rules, in with the real world. That’s the problem to begin with. We have become so lax in our parenting that we are developing generations of lazy, unproductive, overindulged children. Their parents grew up the same way. They only learn what is fun for them. They can tell you all the words to every song on their Ipod but they can’t remember 5 X 5 = 25. They can’t spell because they use text message lingo and everyone accepts that. Parents, teachers and society do not demand excellence from an early age, so the children don’t demand of themselves.

There are too many parents who think children will learn by osmosis. They are so self-absorbed with themselves and by life outside the home they don’t see or care what happens inside.

On the other hand, there are caring parents who teach their children self-control, the importance of learning and how to work for something they want. There are good teachers who have their hands tied when they try to teach excellence. Many are getting discouraged and changing their profession.

And there are children out there who put forth the effort to learn and apply it to a productive life. They are the ones I hope will become the teachers and leaders of tomorrow. The rest will be draining our welfare system forever.

There are some special-needs children who require special learning skills. They deserve all the help we can give them. However, we are raising generations of “special needs” children because parents are neglectful, society accepts mediocrity and school boards look for expensive ways and new fads to educate rather than teach the basics.

5 X 5 equaled 25 in 1930 and in 1960, and it still does in 2008. New Math didn’t work in the 60s and it will not work now. Stop wasting our tax dollars.

I cannot support the school board anymore until they start coming up with ideas that make sense. My vote will be “no,” until they get back to teaching basic principles and build from there.

Source: Idaho Press-Tribune, ID
http://www.idahopress.com/?id=11471

Children as young as three will undergo compulsory exercise regimes of up to two hours every day in preschools.

The New South Wales Government’s anti-obesity program also phases out junkfood with kids now drinking watered down juices and low-fat milk and parents receiving a list of recommended foods for their children’s lunchboxes.

Star jumps, action-singing songs as well as catching, jumping and running are just some of the exercises included in the roll call of daily activities.

The Munch ‘n’ Move blueprint aims to bring down the rocketing rates of childhood obesity in NSW with one in five preschoolers now either overweight or obese.

Nearly 1000 preschools will implement the new healthy lifestyles policy within the next 18 months, with childhood teachers in 14 centres receiving their initial training this week.

“We do music and movement every day but this program also encourages us to do more structured exercise outside where we are teaching children the finer points in jumping, running, hopping, galloping and fundamental movement skills,” said educator Vicky Smith from Five Dock preschool, which is implementing the program.

NSW Health’s Centre for Health Advancement director Liz Develin said once the preschools were completed the program would be rolled out in long-day care centres.

She said that while some parents might question the need to force active three-year-olds into exercise, Ms Develin said recent research showed 89 per cent of children aged four to five spend more than two hours watching a screen every day.

“A lot of three to five-year-olds have started these bad habits early,” Ms Develin said.

“If children are well equipped in fundamental movement skills they are more likely to participate in physical activity and sport later — they’ll have the basic skills of how to run, throw and jump rather than just running around erratically.”

Early childhood teachers will receive a 188-page manual outlining the details of the new exercise and food program, which includes giving children water rather than fruit poppers and cordials so that kids don’t develop a sweet tooth.

It also recommends limiting giving juice to once a day and to the 100 per cent variety, which is then diluted by water by at least half, and suggests reduced-fat milk for children over two.

NSW Health Minister Reba Meagher said the program was devised to combat the growing number of overweight preschoolers as well as educate parents.

“There is clear evidence that the number of people who are overweight or obese is increasing,” she told The Daily Telegraph.

“By the time NSW children reach kindergarten nearly 18 per cent of them are either overweight or obese.”

Source: NEWS.com.au, Australia
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,23971871-2,00.html