Children at play

Citation

Brown, J. (2001), "Children at play", Nutrition & Food Science, Vol. 31 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/nfs.2001.01731aaf.001

Children at play

Children at play

One has only to observe children at play for a few minutes to realise that activity and movement are totally natural. Small children left in a group out of doors will play chasing games. They will run, climb, turn somersaults, leapfrog, skip, turn and manoeuvre until tired. Then they flop down to recuperate before beginning again. Such activity is natural to children and to see them slumped in front of television sets or computer screens for hours is a sad sight indeed. There is nothing wrong with the television or computer, on the contrary, but the constant need for free movement in small children should be accorded its natural place. Their growth as healthy human beings requires exercise and the obesity and heart conditions endemic in our society may be offset thereby.

What of nutrition? I am no expert but having observed my own grandchildren feeding, they prefer to graze and their preferred food seems to be slices of fruit or raw carrot which they ingest easily with every appearance of enjoyment. They love fruit juice and fingers of bread spread with Marmite or jam. It has to be said that sweets and chocolate in moderation go down well also. Small children then need to run about far sooner after a meal than we adults: their restocked energy levels crave release. When tired they will collapse in front of a TV but never for long. In pre-TV days children would curl up in chairs with a favourite book or comic.

I spent most of a teaching career, when not in the classroom, in coaching teenagers in cross-country or track running. School sport all too often now takes a back seat as more school playing fields are sold off by unscrupulous or greedy town councils. If more adolescents took regular strenuous exercise there would be less crime as their energy and self-esteem would be spent elsewhere. The choice of exercise is vast in modern schools. Swimming, basketball, rugby, soccer, athletics, cross-country, fencing, gymnastics, tennis and cricket all have their devotees. The teenager needs physical activity as much as small children but it has to be more structured, more organised, otherwise the testosterone-fuelled youth will turn to causing damage to people and things.

The feeding requirements of sport-playing teenagers are for a large but balanced diet. To some extent their stomachs tell them what they need. The boys in the boarding school in which I latterly taught ate what the school had to offer: plenty of carbohydrate, a reasonable amount of protein, under the inevitable protest of their age group. They supplemented it with a mixture of fruit, meat pies and some junk food but this was rapidly burnt off on the games field each afternoon. Vast fry-ups would take place at weekends and the local takeways did a roaring trade.

One of the merciless aspects of boarding school sporting life is the tyranny of the clock. Boys were expected to down a substantial lunch at 1.15 p.m. and begin violent sporting activity by 2.15 p.m. Adolescents can just about do it without harm but I soon learnt that speed sessions on the track were a waste of time until later in the afternoon. Efforts early after lunch were confined to gentle warm-ups and stretching. Belief in the necessity of rest after a meal was not always the case. Take this description of the aspiring distance runner from Walkers's Manly Exercises, printed in 1856:

When the object in view is the accomplishment of a pedestrian match, his regular exercise may be from 20 to 24 miles a day.

This was preceded by taking large doses of "Glauber's salts", no doubt a strong laxative.

He must rise at five in the morning, run half a mile at the top of his speed uphill and then walk six miles at a moderate speed, coming in about seven to breakfast, which should consist of beefsteaks or mutton chops, underdone, with stale bread and old beer. Immediately after breakfast he must walk again six miles at a moderate pace and at 12 lie down in bed, without his clothes, for half an hour. On getting up he must walk four miles and return by four to dinner, also beefsteaks or mutton chops, with bread and beer, as at breakfast. Immediately after dinner he must resume his exercise by running half a mile at the top of his speed and walking six miles at a moderate pace. He takes no more exercise for that day but retires to bed about eight. Next morning he proceeds in the same manner.

This was not all, because after four weeks or so he endures the "sweating treatment" which involved running four miles encased head to foot in flannel. On returning he was given a hot liquor (one ounce of caraway seeds, one ounce of root liquorice, half an ounce of candy sugar and two bottles of cider boiled down to half quantity). After downing this potent brew he was put to bed in his flannels and covered with up to eight blankets for half a hour:

…when he is taken out and rubbed perfectly dry. Being well wrapped up in his great coat he walks gently for two miles and returns to breakfast which should consist of a roasted fowl. Strong emetics were administered a week before the day of competition.

The amazing thing about such a regime was that athletes like Captain Barclay survived it and went on to create national and world records in paid competition in London parks. Indeed Barclay's matches with Deerfoot are the stuff of legend.

Strenuous exercise in our own day is normally preceded by a light meal several hours before the event. Children's metabolism can deal with food much more quickly, their bodies seem to absorb it and no doubt nature knew what it was doing. Flight from perceived danger is one of the most powerful instincts. Feeding takes second place to escape from predators and this may be why children are able to run or play football straight after eating. Digestion comes later when danger is over.

Any child, including secondary school age, needs a good deal of carbohydrate to burn as muscle glycogen. Marathon runners of all ages often indulge in carbohydrate loading for several weeks before a competition. Stores are needed for the tremendous output of energy to run 26 miles. Long-distance cyclists do the same and this has been found to be the most taxing of all sports. Tour de France cyclists reach an almost superhuman level of fitness, indeed the pulse of the American winner Greg Lemond at the end of a stage was the same as mine at rest!

It is clear that young children, equipped by nature with flexible bodies whose normal state should be movement when not sleeping, suffer great enforced idleness. Junk food, fizzy drinks and poor posture, caused by slumping in front of TV or computer screens for hours at a time, must be the source of long-term problems. Obesity in the young is now of epidemic proportions. Unlike some years ago, children are now conveyed to school in cars. They watch several hours of television per night and spend a considerable part of their school holidays with computer games and often vacuous programmes on TV. Are we creating a generation of heart diseased people who may not survive beyond early middle age?

May I end with a heartening story of a "fatty" who made good? One of the lads at "my" boarding school took well the normal insults of his peer group. Children of any age are quite merciless in deriding physical abnormality and the boy was distinctly tubby. Lurking beneath the rotund good nature was, however, an iron will. Having been placed an ignominious last in the enforced inter-house run, he resolved to transform things. He began running every day and took some dietary advice from the school doctor. Two years later he was slim and fit and the captain of the school cross-country team. It can be done.

People used to be divided into mesomorphs (slim and fit) and endomorphs (fat). There is some truth in this but one can be well built and active. The All-Black Jonah Lomu is 16st of muscle and power and runs 100m in 11secs South African du Randt weighs in at 20st. and is almost as quick. The England batsman Colin Cowdrey was portly but very mobile and flexible, a miracle of hand-eye co-ordination.

Children of all ages must be encouraged to be active in whatever sport they are naturally attracted to. It is also time that some parents and schools started to care about the long-term effects of poor diet and physical inactivity.

John BrownRetired schoolmaster