Before It’s Too Late…

We have one chance to raise our children. And we are blowing it.

It’s not as if we get a do-over for our childhoods…

There is a lot of discussion nowadays about the lifelong impact on some children of a small number of highly traumatic Adverse Child Events (ACEs).

But what happens, when there is a daily stream of harm to all of our kids’ physical & social-emotional health & wellness?

That damage accumulates almost inevitably into a life of physical chronic disease, and often mental unwellness & illness—few escape.

Kids rarely change their habits in adulthood. National longitudinal data imply that >3/4 of students will continue with their unhealthy habits throughout adulthood.

And those chronic conditions permanently limit our job opportunities and income—not to mention the collateral financial damage done to other people, who have to share in chronic costs through ever-higher health insurance, taxes, and a weaker economy.

Child obesity rates in the 20% range (and still growing, especially in severity & among teens) are just the tip of the iceberg. Initial fitness measurements in childhood using nationally-validated assessments imply that ~75+% of lower-income AZ students lack fitness. Based on national surveys & BMI data, there is no reason to believe this is dramatically different in most other states.

But there is hope for a better future, if we do a better job of developing healthier habits in childhood: almost all healthy weight adults were healthy weight youth.

According to research by Telama & others: “physically active lifestyle starts to develop very early in childhood” and “the stability of physical activity is moderate or high along the life course from youth to adulthood.” Also, using a comprehensive lifelong health database for an entire country, Crump et al and Hogstrom et al found a compelling association between teen fitness and good middle-age-adult health.

We need to do our part NOW, and act before it is too late for today’s generation of children to have a healthy future.

Investing in  Healthy Students Healthy States gets us there.