Getting Outdoors - Adam Grant (FGCU)

I think a big social problem nowadays is children not getting out in the fresh air to play their games and live a healthy life. Kids today just sit inside and watch TV and play videogames all day long. No longer is the saying “fun in the sun” as relevant as it was in past times. It is true that as generations come and go there are certain technological advances that come and go along with them, but with all this technology should world around us completely being lost to new generations?

The statistics will shock you to find out how exactly not playing outdoors can and has been affecting the children today. A whopping 70 percent of children of the children in the United States have a vitamin D level that is below what it is supposed to be. If you did not know, vitamin D is also referred to as the “sunshine vitamin” the sunlight is a great and major source of vitamin D. So basically children are not ever going outside to play in the sun anymore and they just sit inside all day and they do not really run around and play like the generations before them did. Dr. Michal Melamed discussed the bad effects of having low levels of vitamin D stating, “There is a lot of data that suggests adults with low vitamin-D levels are at risk for diabetes, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, and a lot of cancers, and if kids start out with low levels and never increase them, they may be putting themselves at risk for developing all of these diseases at a much earlier age.” This is one way to look at this major change, but another way to see it is that the media has played a role in the change as well. Even though crime rates have gone down substantially over the years many people think that it is steadily rising. This is all due to the scary image the media paints of the world by only showing the bad things that happen in the world. This may in turn cause parents to not want their children outside as much because they fear their child will be victim to a kidnapping or some kind of horrendous crime.    

                Whatever the reason may be, we should strive to work hard to get the children of today’s generation back out into the world. Since the media may have had a big effect on this problem it should play a role in undoing the situation at hand. First thing should be to raise awareness about the problem which the media has already taken steps to accomplish through local as well as international news mediums. The next step should be to find ways to get children back outside playing in the fresh air, and there are organizations such as major sports leagues like the NFL who help do things like this. There are also many campaigns that try to get children active in the world again; these are the kinds of things we need to do to reverse this social problem.   

This entry was posted on 3. December 2009 at 06:54 and is filed under Social Problems. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.