From fat kids to hockey

The CBC and others have reported recently on what they are calling a Canadian child obesity epidemic. The reasons for this according to everyone they asked is what the kids are eating. Fast food, soda, chips and cookies. Surprisingly kids prefer eating junk food to healthy snacks! No way. The solutions according to the pointy heads who did the study are to remove soda machines from schools and to make fast food restaurants put warnings on their packaging and to stop advertising to kids. This is supposed to help parents make healthier choices for their kids. Maybe.... but isn't there an easier solution? Sure, of course parents should try to limit the amount of junk their kids eat but once in awhile they should let them off their leash too. Stop holding their hand, stop driving them 3 blocks to school, (this alone would help solve global warming, childhood obesity and road rage all at once). Stop picking them up everywhere they go. Let them ride their skate board and their bike, and let them leave the driveway. Let them play hockey and football and baseball. Stop closing community centers. When I was a kid I didn't stop running or biking or swimming or break-dancing from 1977 through 1987. I ate all the healthy food my mother gave me along with all the junk-food I could get my hands on, like every kid. Kids today spend too much time playing video games it's true but so did we. I remember 6 hour stretches playing Intellivision and drinking Big Gulps. Afterwards though I was allowed to go play hide and seek for 3 hours. So were all the other kids. Oh but times have changed, it's a different world now than it was then. I guess that's true if you mean the world is alot safer now than it was then. Crime is way down from where it was in the 70's and 80's. Pedophiles drove around in their white vans back then too. The Boomers were young and drunk driving their GTO's through your neighbourhood and mine and doing historic damage. Assault, murder, rape and every other violent crime were way more likely then. Yet it is remembered as some innocent past time when we used to be able to leave our doors open and let our kids run free. It's all about perception. The belief is that things are getting worse and worse, crime is out of control and the streets are dangerous. This myth is what Stephen Harper exploits when he talks about cracking down on imaginary crime. When the Americans decided to go hard on crime in the 80's they at least had a crime wave, we don't. Some things have changed for the worse. Gangs are more prevalent, but that is what happens when you cut every program in your welfare state, like Jim Flaherty did in Ontario, and when you close those aforementioned community clubs and kiddie pools. Of course, more kids slip through the cracks and end up easy recruitment targets for gangs. Society forgets about them until a suburban white girl gets caught in the cross-fire on Boxing Day. But even with these gangs running around shooting at each other, you're still much less likely to be shot than you were in the "good old days". This mind set, it seems, has also crept into the NHL. Now I can't pretend to be an expert on today's NHL (I stopped watching when my beloved Jets left town), but the attitude today seems to be that fighting and stick swinging are up. Each time anybody hits anybody with their stick in an ugly way, they get suspended for a longer and longer time. They sometimes even face criminal charges! I've read many sports writers who have even talked about getting rid of fighting!! What a docile little girl's world this has become. There was more stick swinging, fighting and genuine ugly behaviour in one period in a 1977 Flyers game than there was in the whole season last year. But I digress, if you want your kid to be skinny, kick his ass outside!