One in five children in Ireland is overweight, making us the fattest people in Europe Many parents feel they have no option but to drive their brood from door to door. But they may well be killing them with kindness. Kilian Doyle reports
The ever-decreasing numbers of children travelling to school under their own steam is a worrying business.
Cycling to school in the greater Dublin area has plummeted by 80 per cent since 1991. Walking is down by half, while car travel is up by more than 60 per cent. The number of Dublin primary school students being driven to school increased from 32 per cent in 1997 to 50 per cent in 2002 and from 15 per cent to 30 per cent for secondary school children.
And it's not just a Dublin problem - the figures are even worse for Galway, Limerick and other urban centres.
A damning indictment of modern society? Perhaps. But things change. It's pointless lamenting the good old days where children - carrying their desks and younger siblings on their backs - would walk six miles barefoot in the snow, briefly stopping to watch a few comely maidens perform a set at a crossroads on their way to school in a hedge.
Those halcyon days are gone, seen off by a combination of urban sprawl, heavy traffic and other unmentionable dangers facing children on their way to school.
Many parents feel they have no option but to drive their brood from door to door. But they may well be killing them with kindness.
One in five children in Ireland is overweight or obese, making us the fattest people in Europe. Children as young as two are being treated for obesity in the National Children's Hospital, Tallaght. We're even catching up with the US, where most people think walking to the fridge for another bar of lard counts as exercise.
All this is leading to warnings of an "obesity timebomb". I don't know about you, but I don't fancy being there when it goes off.
(An RTÉ newsreader recently told us "there are more overweight people in the world than hungry people". Which struck me as strange. At risk of sounding flippant, surely half the reason obese people are in that state is because they're always hungry?)
There are lots of reasons for this fat explosion, not least time-strapped parents resorting to fast food to sate their baying broods.
But the primary cause is lack of exercise. For most kids, lifting the TV remote control is about as strenuous as their day gets. And this is why driving your kids to school may be killing them.
For some, the logistics of their situation - namely distance, poor bus links and roads too dangerous to drive a tank down, never mind cycle a bike along - means their excuse for driving stands up. But not for all.
According to a DTO survey in 2002, nearly a third of students living under a mile from school in the greater Dublin area travelled there by car. A mile is only a five-minute cycle or a 15-minute walk. So why are these kids being driven to within 10 feet of school gates?
I suspect their ostentatious parents' desire to show off their cars may be to blame. These mental midgets, by using their children to justify owning ridiculous SUVs, are shamelessly sacrificing their offsprings' futures for the sake of their own egos.
It's deeply ironic that self-satisfied SUV drivers prattle on about protecting their children when the very fact of driving them everywhere in urban tractors could be dooming them to a life of heart disease, diabetes and other obesity-related illnesses.
If you really want to put your child's health and safety first, leave your ego at home with the car keys and walk or cycle with them to school. Best of all, set up a walking bus. (Details on DTO website www.dto.ie)
The benefits of the walking bus are many - the kids get exercise, learn road safety and are, critically, supervised.
Not only does supervision keep them safe, but it also prevents the resourceful little blighters from nipping into the shops and blowing their hoarded pennies on megamonster chocolate-flavoured chunks of fat, completely defeating the object of the exercise.
Parents are actively encouraged to go too, allowing them to mingle with one another, rather than sneering superciliously at each other through their windscreens. Everyone wins.
Still unconvinced? That's your choice.
But here's a fact that may have escaped you, one that might poke your ego into action: Obesity isn't just for kids.