Agree with this also.

I had no idea that recess and PE was getting cut back like that. Yes, definitely cut back on the tv watching and video games playing for sure. I agree that not enough parents do enough or encourage their kids to go outside and just play.

I never had a problem with my step daughters eating whatever they wanted and playing video games or watching tv, but, they also played sports and liked to go outside and ride bikes and not just be in all the time. You are right though, parents need to take an active role and be the one that is in charge of their kids eating and activities.

Unless he is smoking crack and doing dance dance revolution I seriously doubt it.

In Missouri, our legislative body passed a law stating that elementary school kids are REQUIRED to have 150 minutes a week of physical activity. This includes P.E. and recess. The stipulation is that a qualified instructor must be present for the 150 minutes. No more recess aides.

Sorry for the delayed response, had to take an unexpected conference call so I was afk.


None? No, not at all.

And the presumption others made on my behalf was largely correct, my observation was meant primarily to his mindset, and had I not been interrupted here by the phone I was planning to head back to clarify because I had realized I phrased it with too much room for interpretation. Sorry 'bout that.

Now that said (and hopefully cleared up), I did read your post today as "none" rather than "a little" or "an occasional treat". And I do feel like that's (i.e. none, nada, zip, zero) largely unrealistic as well as detrimental to a child's social & mental well-being.

I've known, hmm, three kids in my son's classes like that over the years & in addition to being the objects of regular pity from their peers (at least from ages 4-12, beyond that I haven't done yet) they're also collectively some of the most unpleasant & unhappy children I've ever seen. It's as though they know something is missing but they don't quite know what, I wouldn't call them unhappy because of the specific absence of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups/abundance of organic wheat germ but moreso unhappy because there's some vague persistent sense of loss that I doubt they could even put their finger on. And that steady unhappiness has in turn made them unpleasant little critters.


See, I didn't read it that way the first time, probably my bad there, sorry for any confusion.

The big thing we don't allow our children to have is soft drinks. Our oldest has had Sprite on occasion when his stomach has felt bad, but otherwise nothing. Our daughter has never had one at all.

Otherwise, we allow "junk" Our oldest inherited my wife's sweet tooth. But they just know they have to have something 'healthy" first. Thankfully, our kids love fruit and often eat that as a snack. They are big into celery too for some off reason.

As for video games, my son loves them. My wife blames me as I'm a junkie and I wouldn't deny it. He played a lot in the winter, but now that it's getting warmer he's begging to go out more and more. He'll always play some games...he's got my geek gene.

Overall, I think we are pretty balanced. WIsh I could say the same for some kids in my class.

I'm mostly in this boat. Neither of my kids LIKE soft drinks, and both do like water, which we know is very fortunate for us. We limit junk food, it's mostly a treat. Desert ends up being more of a bribe to eat their whole dinner; they know they don't get anything if they don't eat the healthy stuff at dinner. Sometimes that's a motivator, sometimes it isn't. We have two kids that will gladly go to bed hungry rather than eat something they really don't want to eat. Both went through periods at 3-4 where they were VERY limited in what they wanted to eat. Our daughter has expanded quite a bit, although she still limits herself to just a couple of fruits and vegetables she'll eat, so that is a challenge getting her variety. Our son is just starting to come out of this period; he's suddenly decided he likes pretending to be a bunny and so likes miniature carrots raw for example.

All-in-all, not as healthy as we'd like, much healthier than we feared, and doing pretty well for the limited time we have to cook as a two-income household.

My kid eats nothing but gloriously free and healthy breastmilk. I wonder how long I can keep him on that diet?

We really haven't found a fruit or vegetable that ours doesn't like. Now meat on the other hand is pretty much limited to chicken dark meat, turkey bacon and anything really tender.

The birthing class we just took said you can breast feed a kid until its 2. That is just creepy to me.

Heh, years ago I had a fellow server tell me about a table he was waiting on. A five or six year old kid kept telling mom that he "wanted binky", and she kept telling him no. I guess his constant badgering got to her, because he later went to the table and mom had a blanket over her torso, and the kid was under it. Super creepy...

Oh, and just last night the wife was telling me that she wants to try for a year. She originally was only going to do 6 months, but she actually enjoys feeding him and the longer she does it the better it is for the both of them...

I went for option 3. Grandma looks after the healthy stuff :)

In ours, they told us that the average child breast feeds for a year. We figure that stat is for the entire world, not just the US, for it to possibly be correct. Anyway, we made the decision to switch to formula yesterday, at 12 days old.

wow, we were told to breastfeed exclusively for the first 3 weeks.

We are going to have to do a combo when my wife goes back to work so we will be introducing the bottle as well.

P.E. is a real pet peeve of mine. For many kids, it is just a period of social awkwardness. Rather than forcing kids to play games that they hate and have no skills for, give them some choices and cut down on the 15 min to take attendance and 15 min to wrap up at the end. One choice should always be to let the kids walk. Let them walk around the gym for 45 min. If people truly want kids to exercise, that is far better than standing around for your one turn at kickball or softball (and waiting for the other kids to laugh at you). I understand that part of school is to expose kids to different activities but some kids have absolutely no desire to compete in sports. Every kid can walk/jog/run and should always have that option. Like many other things in today's schools, most rules are set to comply with some government mandated "program." The forest is usually missed for the trees.

I have kids in both categories. I am a sports nut but my daughter made it very apparent from an extremely young age that she hated "ball" of any kind. My son can't get enough. My daughter is social enough that P.E. wasn't necessarily awkward but she hated it and really got nothing from it. Now she is 20 and her main form of exercise is running. My son gets plenty of exercise on his own.

The bottom line is that kids need to be active more than to be exposed to a certain number of activities mandated by some program. I'm sure most of us on this board can see that our kids get a decent level of activity...that's not the case for many households. Walking for 45 min might not cause any dramatic changes in a person but it is better for many kids than what goes on in most gym classes.

It's not just possible, it's what's recommended by the World Health Organization and the American Academy of Pediatrics. I don't want to sidetrack this into a breastfeeding discussion, as we pretty much know exactly how that will go. But despite the fact that most of us didn't grow up in an environment where that was normal, it's not only biologically normal, but medically recommended.

Yeah, I'm all for encouraging kids to be active, when I think about how active I was as a kid versus what is the norm now, it's crazy. But PE was not a place, in the upper grades, where anyone was really very active. It was mostly standing around. You'd get the kids more exercise just taking them on a walking tour of town or something than having them stand on a volleyball court and pretend to play.

You've never met my son.

He's pretty much jumping up and down running back and forth the whole time no matter what he's playing. He sprints about 100 feet for each roll in bowling, 200 for each throw of the frisbee to the dog, etc. After 10 minutes of playing Wii, he's sweating like a pig.

The point being, he is unquestionably getting exercise while playing Wii. As opposed to say, playing leapster/DS/watching TV, during which he is completely sedentary.

The distinction is important while living in upstate New York, where winter is 10 months a year.

Yeah, I'm glad that Wii was the first type of video game my son played as he seems to think all video games require him to be running around the room like crazy while he's playing it.

Wii is just a gateway to getting high and sitting on your ass and playing fps all day.

We were pretty annoyed by this -- they told us we could breastfeed exclusively also, but our first night in the hospital, they basically made us give him formula. We kept trying to get the nurse to explain things, and she kept simply saying "the baby needs to eat" -- and we're like, we know the baby needs to eat, dumbass. Anyway, after a few days, he lost more weight than he should, so we've had to supplement with formula anyway to be sure he's getting enough, so even when he was breastfeeding, he probably had just as much formula as breast milk anyway.

We had to supplement with formula for the first four or five days until my wife's milk really came in. Since then, we've only given him formula a couple of times when he was in a growth spurt and my wife couldn't pump enough to keep him fed at daycare. But we did have trouble early on, Pass, and my wife got very frustrated with him for not latching and with her boobs for not producing a while lot. It took a couple of weeks, but they finally got it down and it's been smooth sailing ever since...

We'd kill for him to have the ability to sit still for 30 seconds. Not worried.

It's very normal to lose a lot of weight in the first two weeks, especially when breastfeeding I think. Hopefully the hospital staff knows this, but I wouldn't bet on it. I see a lot of parents being misinformed about things like that, and that's one reason people get discouraged from breastfeeding.

We were told it is normal for them to lose about 10% I believe.

Same with us. He lost 14%, though, so they were a little worried.