Katelyn Dorwart: Childhood Obesity and the School Systems

Childhood obesity is on the rise. It is sad to see children who are so young and can not control what they eat because their parents buy their food and pack their lunches. Even those kids who do not pack a lunch, are not offered healthy options at school and if they are, they are not of very high quality food. The food is one of the major problems with childhood obesity and you can not blame the child but the parents who do not take the effort to insure that the child has healthy options to choose from. However, the schools carry just as much blame because the children who  are on school lunch are not offered healthy options. At my high-school everyday we are offered pizza, chicken sandwiches, and nachos; the healthy options being old sandwich wraps which no one is even willing to touch. Would it really be that much more money to ensure the health of children? Won’t we spend more money paying for their health-care when they are submitted for  a heart-attack? Not only are the food choices poor but more and more schools are eliminating sources of activity such as recess and gym time. I know for a fact that my little brothers had their recess time cut out this year. That’s ridiculous. Children can not be shut up all day in a class room sitting there. They need to have time to run around and be kids and interact with each-other, not get yelled at for talking to one another while doing a worksheet from a standardized test book. The government needs to stop taking money out of education because the children are the future and we do not want an obese society to be the next generation. It’s a sad day when the possibility arises that a child might have a shorter life span than their parents because the parents and the schools did not take the initiative to ensure their child’s health.

This entry was posted on 4. August 2010 at 18:24 and is filed under Mr. Andoscia, Introduction to Sociology. 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.