Pedometers in schools a cheap marketing ploy
If your kid came home with a bit of red plastic around their wrist last week, don’t be alarmed. Actually, be a little alarmed – they have been ‘‘tagged’’ by the enormous insurance conglomerate AIA group. Thanks to the kind support of the AIA group and Sovereign (owned by AIA group), your kids, like mine, are part of 55,000 others currently having their steps monitored and collated daily in their own classrooms. Thankfully, in true awesome-kid style, most of the classroom discussion I have overheard is around techniques for fudging the numbers. But the underlying ideology here is disturbing.
If you take the rhetoric seriously, the insurance company is responding to twin societal horrors: childhood obesity and the stalking trauma of too much screen-time. Its opening line in the press release is, ‘‘We are becoming an obese and inactive nation’’ and it has enlisted various sportspeople and other cheerleaders of fitness to promote the cause.
Putting aside the basic and well-understood inaccuracies linking body size measured by BMI to health (google obesity paradox), there is absolutely no evidence that wildly inaccurately measuring children’s steps with corporate-supplied pedometers will have any impact at all on the combined biomass of the little humans wandering around Aotearoa.
This campaign, provocatively headlined ‘‘First steps taken on childhood obesity’’ (as if these are actually the first steps), has next to nothing to do with childhood obesity and almost everything to do with corporate marketing. It is pretty impressive that the company has managed to tag your kid with its corporate symbol, and tell you it’s a good thing. It’s also produced 55,000 pieces of future plastic trash. At least the pedometers don’t have GPS chips in them (it is only a matter of time).
But worse than that, they are pitting children against one another each day. My kids are not the ‘‘sporty’’ type – my son because he has cerebral palsy and my daughter because she doesn’t much like getting wet or dirty. Now, I have no problem with the school encouraging them to do active stuff, which they do really well. I see both my kids out and about alongside the more sports-focused kids all the time.
And I don’t blame the school for jumping on the AIA bandwagon – the company is promising to shell out $50,000 in sports grants. Schools are underfunded, so any opportunity for extra funding is tackled with gusto. But let’s get some context, folks, $50,000 – that’s less than $1 per tagged child, from a company that was proud to have an embedded value of more than US$50 billion at the end of 2017. The CEO alone earns around US$5.5 million a year so $50,000 is chump change.
So, what do we do about the twin terrors that AIA is so worried about: childhood obesity and screen-time? Luckily, I have some academically informed opinion, things that are supported in research in my disciplines of critical health studies and psycho-sociology. Childhood obesity: First, don’t panic, because it is a moral panic. Second, increase the income of the poorest New Zealanders significantly and immediately. It is their kids who will benefit from better nutrition and access to activity, not those at my kids’ decile 10 school. Third, regulate the big food industry in a number of areas to stop it producing and marketing poor quality food to kids and to reduce the price significantly and immediately of foods that are good for us.
Screen-time: First, don’t panic, because it is a moral panic. Second, accept that it is rarely the screen that is the problem. What a kid sees on a screen might be a problem, but so might relationships with their friends, or their fixation on fidget spinners. It is actually possible that they might learn something from the screen. Third, follow your parental instincts. You know when they’ve had too much of something – if they’ve had too much Fortnite, do something about it.
Finally, AIA group, please leave the competition and obesity rhetoric hand-wringing out of it. If you want to donate sporting equipment and other branded ancillary devices to schools, then just do it. health sociologist and senior lecturer at Massey University’s School of People, Environment and Planning