Grandparents & Seniors
You care deeply about future generations: our grandchildren. And their inactivity & mental health worries you more & more…What can you do?
When our organization successfully co-led school recess law advocacy in 2017-2018, our bill sponsor was Chair of the Arizona Senate Education Committee—and also a grandmother of 14! And she was worried—and knew that many parents & grandparents were concerned about today’s children being too inactive.
(Not to mention that our nonprofit Healthy Future US’s founder is now a grandfather of seven—up from zero grandkids, when he founded our organization!)
When we first started our advocacy for children’s health, we knew that child obesity was growing—though it seemed to be primarily a low-income issue, predominantly among blacks and Latinos.
It turns out that we were focusing too narrowly—on fast-rising child obesity rates. Shockingly, it turned out that prediabetes was growing much faster than child obesity—even in white and middle-income families, leading to more than 1 in 3 teens with prediabetes today!
In fact, inactivity and unhealthy nutrition are so widespread, that the odds of developing health issues early in life keep getting worse—whether you are White, Black, Native-American, Asian-American or Latino…and whether you are middle-income, low-income or even wealthy!
As many of you know—historically, Type-2 diabetes is a health condition associated primarily with old age. In fact, just several decades ago—Type-2 diabetes was called “adult-onset” diabetes.
Now, inactivity and unhealthy nutrition from toddlerhood onward are so common, that we even have tweens and teens developing Type-2 diabetes!
Does your grandchild have prediabetes—or even diabetes? Are you sure? Nearly 1 in 3 odds among teens across incomes & ethnicities are not good.
Warning: in contrast with obesity, prediabetes has been increasing invisibly—because our teens did not yet have obvious symptoms…and who ever heard of doing diabetes-related blood tests on teenagers anyway—until now!
Diabetes is often referred to as an “invisible disease” or “silent killer”—by the time you have obvious symptoms, your body has been slowly damaged for many years, without anyone realizing it.
Prediabetes has been hiding in plain sight—even among normal weight kids!
Teen Mental Health & Social Media Harm
As for kids’ mental health: We all know that teenagers go through mood swings, including times when they feel “down”—so-called teen “angst”.
But the long-term increase in teens reporting prolonged periods of disabling sadness (i.e., deep negative feelings that interfere with their regular activities) is very concerning. And the percentage of teens who say they had planned or even attempted suicide is shocking.
In fact, parents very often do not realize that their teen is truly depressed:
Teen depression rates are 2-3 times higher than parents think, affecting 6-7% of teens at any one time and 16% of teens at some point in the year.
Researchers think that social media has a lot to do with the growth of harmful thoughts over the last decade—as teen smartphone use grew and social media mushroomed.
Parents (and grandparents!) are very concerned—but often don’t know what to do.
Some people are worried about schools taking over parental roles. Clearly, parental rights must be respected. And parents should be able to opt out of school education & support for developing healthy habits, if parents find something controversial about certain topics, or prefer to handle some health-related issues completely by themselves.
But can parents teach their children healthier habits successfully enough, completely on their own?
Unfortunately, the results are in: the majority of parents are struggling to improve their children’s physical & mental health just by themselves.
All parents want their teenagers to be mentally and physically healthy and to be successful in life—and most parents are grateful for assistance with that.
Parents cannot be replaced by schools. But parents do count on schools to help educate their children for success in life—in a wide range of ways, that parents often have neither the time nor the training to do by themselves.
Since “health is the greatest wealth”—why are we allowing future generations to be harmed with preventable health issues…from so early in life?!?
As health risks grow, we all need to work together to prepare our children for a healthier future.
How Can We Improve This? Healthy Students Healthy State.
What is more: how will our grandchildren be able to afford to pay for their health costs, if most of them have chronic conditions from their teen years or their 20s or 30s?
And remember, even if your own kids & grandkids are healthy—in our country:
the healthy people pay the same private insurance premiums (except for nonsmokers), and the same taxes for government-funded health care (such as Medicare & Medicaid), as unhealthy people—even though healthy people’s actual health care costs are much lower.
In other words, healthy people heavily subsidize unhealthy people.
Our schools are the only practical affordable setting to address such widespread issues, and improve the health of a large part of the population that will otherwise be unhealthy—with high health costs for them, and for the rest of us!
Quality physical education, recess and other physical activity at school are the only proven way to keep children active on a regular basis—whatever they are doing outside school.
And regular activity also has a huge positive impact on mental health.
Listen to what grandchildren (in this case, middle school students from a wide variety of backgrounds) have to say about their physical education.
How Can I Help?
We need your help in getting the word out!
One quick easy step that you can take now to help us is to fill out our Contact form.
(We only use your email address for our own work. And relax: we will not solicit you for donations.)
No matter how much or how little time you spend supporting us: having you in our e-network will help us a great deal in showing that the public is interested in this issue.
You have more power than you realize.
Red-state legislators such as in Arizona listen especially to seniors, who tend to vote regularly and more conservatively.
Another thing you can do is to encourage the AARP and your retirement community or local senior center, or a nonprofit where you volunteer or donate, to support Healthy Students Healthy State.
When you fill out the Contact form, you can specify, if and how you want us to follow up with you.
Another thing you can do is to encourage your own personal network of friends, family and colleagues, to support Healthy Students Healthy State.
To do this, on your mobile device please hold down to copy a link to this webpage to text them;
or click to forward this webpage via email now.
About Healthy Future US – click to Email to others now
Healthy Students Healthy State – Overview & Details – click to Email to others now.
Thank you! Working together, we can make a better world for future generations!