Children still skip rope and play pickup ballgames, but today’s parents also organise play-dates, fitness lessons and gym classes to keep their kids active and safe.
Almost 17 per cent of US children and adolescents were obese in 2009-10, according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. Many adults willingly suffer to banish love handles, but children insist on having a good time. So making fitness fun is key, experts say, along with starting early.
“We used to simply play outside,” said Dr Avery Faigenbaum, a paediatric exercise scientist, professor and researcher at the College of New Jersey. “Some parks and playgrounds are too unsafe. We need programmes but we need to be sure they’re developmentally appropriate.”
Just as learning a language is easier when it is started as a child, the same is true for movement, according to Faigenbaum.
Total body movements, as in dance and martial arts are ideally suited to young children, he added, especially when performed under the guidance of an instructor who can connect with children.
“Those are skills children can carry over for life,” he said.
Jodi B. Komitor, a former elementary school teacher and the founder of Next Generation Yoga, teaches yoga to children starting at 18 months.
“Children learn through movement and yoga is a movement-based science that’s been around for over 5,000 years,” said Komitor.
“A lot of parents tell us their kids start doing downward dog naturally,” she added, referring to the yoga pose.
Komitor designed her first studio for kids’ yoga, in New York, after the Wizard of Oz. Unlike adult yoga sessions, which cultivate quietness, her children’s classes are often noisy and always age-specific. Classes have a foundation of yoga poses and incorporate playfulness and self-expression.
Much as Zumba, the Latin-based dance/fitness craze, purported to hide the fitness in the party, Zumba CEO Alberto Perlman likes to say that Zumbatomic, the dance classes designed for kids ages four to 12, hides the medicine in the candy.
Ashley Walters runs the Kid Action programme at Streb in Brooklyn, New York. The programme, based on the choreography of founder Elizabeth Streb, intertwines dance, athletics, boxing, rodeo and circus skills.