Nanny State American Style & Childhood Obesity

Lawn Darts were a fun game. I played them growing up. There are some obvious risks associated with lawn dart. You have kids tossing an aerodynamic, pointed peace of metal in the general direction of other kids. It was pretty obvious to all of us back then that we did not want to get hit by them. We did not know it then, be we were conducting a "risk assessment" and acting accordingly.

My kids never had the opportunity to play with lawn darts. Lawn darts were taken off the market by the time my kids were of an age to be interested by such things. Lawn darts were not taken off the market because they were unpopular. They got sued out of existence. They are a metaphor for what is happening to our society.

Our own socialist nanny state is nowhere near as advanced as what we see in the UK, but it is following in British footsteps. One of those areas is in the insane drive to take all risk out of childhood. One, its not possible. Two, kids - and the adults they will become - need to have a common sense ability to handle risk. And three, taking out risk takes the fun - and the exercise - out of childhood.
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An excellent article in the WSJ on risk and childhood:

Just when we thought playgrounds were accident-proof -- no more merry-go-rounds, high slides, jungle gyms, seesaws or pretty much anything that's fun -- it turns out that safety itself can be dangerous. A recent heat wave in New York exposed a new playground risk: The ubiquitous rubber safety matting gets hot, not as hot as McDonald's coffee, but hot enough to scald tender feet.

The outrage was immediate. "Playgrounds should be designed with canopies," one park- safety advocate declared. "How many burn cases will it take," Betsy Gotbaum, the city's public advocate asked, "before the city wakes up and acts?"

The headlong drive for safety has indeed created dangers, but not those identified by the safety zealots. Risk is important in child development. Allowing children to test their limits in unstructured play, according to the American Association of Pediatrics, "develop[s] their imagination, dexterity, and physical, cognitive, and emotional strength." Scrapes and bruises are how children learn their limits, and the need to take personal responsibility.

The harmful effects of our national safety obsession ripple outward into society. One in six children in America is obese, and many of them will face a lifetime of chronic illness. According to the Center for Disease Control, this problem would basically cure itself if children engaged in the informal outdoor activities that used to be normal. But how do we lure children off the sofa? One key attraction is risk.

Risk is fun, at least the moderate risks that were common in prior generations. An informal survey of children by the University of Toronto's Institute of Child Studies found that "merry-go-rounds . . . anecdotally the most hated piece of playground equipment in hospital emergency rooms -- topped the list of most desired bits of playground equipment." Those of us of a certain age can remember sprinting to get the contraption really moving. That was fun. And a lot of exercise.

America unfortunately is going in the opposite direction. There is nothing left in playgrounds that would attract the interest of a child over the age of four. Exercise in schools is carefully programmed, when it exists at all. Some schools have banned tag. Broward County, Fla., banned running at recess. (How else can we guard against a child falling down?) Little Leagues forbid sliding into base. Some towns ban sledding. High diving boards are history, and it's only a matter of time before all diving boards disappear.

Safety is meaningful only in the context of other benefits and risks. Safety always involves trade-offs -- of opportunities, of scarce resources and, especially in the case of children's play, of learning to manage risk. The question is whether the trade-off makes sense. Soft rubber matting will cushion any fall. This is probably a good thing, at least in situations where children may fall on their heads. But rubber matting also gets hot.

There's only one solution. Someone on behalf of society must be authorized to make these choices. Courts must honor those decisions. Otherwise, the pious accusations of safety fanatics, empowered by the nearly universal fear of being sued, will guarantee a cultural spiral downwards toward the lowest common denominator.

For America's children today, that means spending more than six hours per day staring at a screen. Is that the way we want our children to grow up? . . .

Read the entire article.

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Nanny State In Action

I posted on my companion blog, Wolf Health, that Britain faces a nation wide crisis over widening obesity rates. Now we see local councils advocating that the State take control of "dangerously" obese children and remove them from their families.
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This from the Sun:

Dangerously fat kids could be taken from their parents and put into care, council chiefs declared yesterday.

They warned that the worst cases of obesity will be increasingly seen as evidence of "parental neglect."

Social workers will have to step in to offer advice to protect the child's welfare.

In the most extreme cases, children could even be taken away from parents.

. . . The dramatic warning was delivered by the Local Government Association, which represents more than 400 councils in England and Wales.

Around one in four people in England are obese, so overweight that it threatens their health.

But experts fear HALF the population will be affected by 2032.

LGA public health spokesman David Rogers said some councils were already taking actions "where parents are putting children's health in real danger.

"Councils would step in to deal with an under-nourished and neglected child so should a case with a morbidly obese child be different?

. . . "There needs to be a national debate about the extent to which it is acceptable for local authorities to take action in cases where the welfare of children is in real jeopardy."

. . . But Mr Rogers said childhood obesity had now become an issue for every council.

Tough action was needed to protect the health of millions of children. . . .

Read the entire article.

Of all the ways that this problem can be addressed, taking a child from his family seems the absolute worst possible decision. Whether a child grows up fat or slim may be a concern of the state, but it is so patently obvious that there is so much more involved in the family unit that bears on what the child will grow into as to make this draconian policy proposal utterly insane. And even besides that, there are a thousand things the state can do to promote health and weight loss, not the least of which is mandating more physical activities for school age children. It is one thing to use the bully pulpit, another thing entirely to use the police powers of the state against a family.

But, sad to say, I am not surprised that this suggestion should arise in the U.K. As a general rule, the socialist left believes in the superiority of centralized power and that those in power - so long as they are reliably socialist - are in a better position to make decisions effecting individuals than individuals can make for themselves. Socialists also tend to have far less respect for the traditional family unit - as the U.K.'s welfare system among others makes clear. Modern Britain is a true laboratory experiement in socialism and multiculturalism transposed on top of a Western democracy.

Cross posted at Wolf Health.

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