Our children are falling apart. They are flabbier, less flexible and their carriage is far more crumpled than their European peers. Research among Irish children aged five to 10 shows that more than 40 per cent of Irish children undertake less physical activity than they need.
This research was conducted by Dr Tony Watson, director of the Growth and Development Centre at the University of Limerick (UL). Watson has discovered that Irish children have aerobic fitness levels which are less than 80 per cent of the European average. Obviously this degree of unfitness has serious implications for children's health. With this in mind, the VHI recently launched a campaign designed to encourage children to take more exercise. Go For It is an education programme which has a range of suggested activities. As part of the initiative, an activity poster is being circulated to more than 80,000 homes illustrating various play ideas children can pick and choose from.
There's nothing wildly new and exciting among these ideas - they are the games anyone who has spent any amount of time in Ireland should be familiar with: hopscotch, leapfrog, musical chairs. The programme is not about sending your children to the local gym for a daily work-out - it's about helping them find time to have some fun. Dr Marie Murray, co-ordinator of the new master's degree in family therapy at UL and a senior child psychologist, explains: "Play is serious business. It gives children the opportunity to get in quite a lot of physical exercises which helps them stay fit, and it also helps them develop a range of physical, intellectual and social skills. "A game like hopscotch, for example, involves fairly sophisticated hand-eye co-ordination. "These are all games people a generation ago grew up on, unwittingly taking the skills they developed for granted. Nowadays our children play out less and less, with the result that we have an increase in conditions like dyspraxia.
"In the past, by the time the kids had all finished tearing around the place keeping up with one another they had of necessity developed particular skills. Nowadays we have to bring them to multi-sensory therapy to rectify problems they have developed." There are all sorts of issues feeding into the apparent demise of one of the most essential ingredients of childhood. Fewer children chase their way to and from school, due largely to traffic and "stranger-danger" fears.
More homework and an emphasis on doing well at school younger and younger means more time spent slouched over books. The television, video games, computer games and even the sort of educational toys parents buy their children with the best of intentions, are eating into the time once spent outside playing. "Ironically, now that parents have an increasingly sophisticated understanding of their children's developmental needs, they are providing for them in ways which are actually preventing their children from thriving," Murray remarks. "Families are smaller and more child-focused. Parents seek to give their children all sorts of beneficial opportunities in the form of computer games and extracurricular classes, but this has lead to less and less time to play, and many of the old games which had in fact as many, if not more, benefits than what we now offer our children are dying out."
When children get together and play for hours on end with little or no adult intervention, they teach themselves things their parents spend hours tearing their hair out trying to explain. "Children invent very complex games which involve a range of skills," Murray says. "They learn to negotiate, they learn to understand and carry out rules, they learn planning and organisational skills, they learn how to shift the direction something is taking so their own ideas are incorporated, and they learn to feel their way through difficult group dynamics.
"But perhaps one of the most important things they learn is who they are. By adopting roles in an imaginative world where anything can happen, children actually develop a sense of self, something which is invaluable for their self-esteem."
ALONGSIDE THE SOCIAL and psychological benefits of play are the skills children pick up which help them learn academic skills at school. "A pretend game, where children might use an old box as a car, a house or an aeroplane, for example, is the sort of symbolic play which paves the way towards developing an understanding of the symbolic systems we use in reading and maths," Murray says.
There is a tough, cut-throat market out there feeding on parental feelings of guilt and inadequacy. A child moaning "I'm bored" translates to parent ears as "you've failed me, and my future is ruined". In fact, parents might do no better than to tell the bored child to go and play. "Where children play happily without adult direction, they tend to learn the skills they need to learn." Murray says. "It's not that high-tech games, television or educational toys and extracurricular classes are bad for children. They are fun, and useful, but there is a need for some balance. "Giving children the time, and a safe environment, in which to play is crucial to their well-being."
