Our kids on a slow and sad decline
CHILDREN feeling unjustly treated by their parents is not a new phenomenon.
Throughout history, teenagers have complained that their parents do not understand them, while most kids at one time or another will bemoan that their folks are too strict.
Most of the time, family disputes can be put down to an element of generational misunderstanding and over-reaction from both parties.
Today’s parents who grew up in the ’80s and ’90s cannot even comprehend the lifestyle and experience of the current generation of children brought up in the digital age.
But it seems all those parents who were tearing their hair out over the school holidays, trying to prise their children from their Xbox or personal device, might have been on to something.
New research has revealed that Australian children are losing fundamental movement skills, with the average current primary school student not able to jump as far as children in 1985.
Titled “The Great Leap Backwards,” the study found that current 11 and 12-year-olds fell an average 16.4cm short of their 1985 counterparts, while a new national report card said grade 6 children had extremely low levels of “mastery” in kicking, throwing overarm, catching and leaping.
The rapid strides in technology that have provided current primary school-aged children with a far more sedentary lifestyle than their predecessors is, unsurprisingly, one of the main factors experts have attributed to the current decline.
For many children today, entertainment comes by way of a hand-held device or a gaming console. They use these same devices to communicate with their peers and are able to spend large amounts of time “playing” with their friends without actually leaving the couch.
The days of riding bikes to a friend’s house, playing backyard cricket with the neighbourhood kids or even just hitting a tennis ball against a wall seem to be long gone. And it seems our children are suffering for it.
Perhaps those parents were right after all.