Rediscovering Playtime

By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK

It's 10:30 on a Saturday morning, and like a typical New Yorker, Biz Johnson-Brown, 31/2, is running late. Class has already been in session for half an hour when she parks her purple Princess bike near the door and, accompanied by her father, Bruce Brown, joins half a dozen other children as they climb and crawl and tiptoe their way through a miniature obstacle course under the relentlessly cheerful supervision of their beloved drill sergeant, Miss Leah.

This is the big-city version of Gymboree, the international kiddie-fitness franchise, and if you didn't know you were in the windowless basement of an apartment tower on the Upper East Side, the mango-sherbet walls, brightly colored play equipment and fuzzy purple apes and orange- pink-and-green spiders suspended from the ceiling could just as easily be in any small town or suburban strip mall.

And like their country cousins in hundreds of similar toddler play programs across the U.S., these kids simply love the chance to burn off energy and master their muscular and coordination skills. It's no surprise either. Running, jumping, climbing and spinning around in circles have always been an indispensible part of childhood. And until the past few decades, they were an integral part of U.S. children's lives--playing out on the street or in the park or backyard after school and on weekends, organizing pick-up games of soccer, tag or baseball, racing around the neighborhood or going off to camp all summer long, and, just for good measure, burning calories in gym classes from September through June.

Yet those nostalgic images of an active childhood that most adults carry in their memories have all but disappeared in much of the nation. City streets and parks are often too dangerous for kids to play in. Suburban streets teem with traffic. TV, video games and the Internet seduce children into staying indoors and sitting inert. Even in quiet towns, walking or biking to school is increasingly rare.

At the same time, budget problems have forced school boards across the U.S. to cut back on "unnecessary" programs like art, music and physical education, while pressure from parents to raise academic standards has in many places squeezed even recess from the curriculum. Only 56% of U.S. high school students were enrolled in a phys-ed class as of the most recent survey, in 2003, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and only 28% have gym every day, down from 42% in 1991. And that's overall; the percentages among African-American and Hispanic kids are even lower.

Add the lure of fatty, sugary fast food--available even in school cafeterias these days--and you've got a generation that's less fit and more prone to obesity than any in history. In the late 1970s, about 7% of U.S. kids were classified as obese; by 2000 that percentage had doubled.

Fitness itself is difficult to measure directly in kids, according to Dr. William Dietz, director of the nutrition and physical-activity division at the CDC. To do it right, you should put them on a treadmill with a mouthpiece in place and their noses plugged up, and work them to exhaustion while measuring oxygen consumption. "It's hard to get anyone under 10 to do that," he says.

So while excess weight doesn't necessarily mean a child is out of shape, it's a reasonably good indicator of insufficient exercise; extra pounds in turn make exercise even less attractive. The dangers of a sedentary lifestyle don't become fully apparent until later in life, when illnesses like cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis and high blood pressure, appear. But if the habit of being inert is established during childhood, it's hard to break.

Unfortunately, it isn't easy to push fitness on overweight children. With adults, physical exercise is often a means to an important goal like disease prevention or a slimmer waistline. "They want to lose weight, to fit into that wedding dress, this year's bathing suit and so forth," says Dr. Reginald Washington, a pediatric cardiologist and co-chairman of the National Task Force on Obesity for the American Academy of Pediatrics. "They're self-motivated. Most kids aren't." That isn't a problem for children like Biz Johnson-Brown, whose parents have the resources and presence of mind to schedule physical activity into their lives (she and her father play soccer in a parent-child league on the weekends too, and Bruce Brown is already angling to get his daughter to play softball). For them and for kids who get involved in competitive sports, fitness may never be much of an issue.

For the rest, though, reversing the downward trend in fitness won't be so easy. "Physical-education classes tend to cater to the successful, coordinated child," says Washington. "So if you're a bit clumsy, a bit uncoordinated, a bit self-conscious--you're left out." Traditional P.E. also tends to presume that kids arrive fit. "I don't know if you grew up around the same time that I did," says Lashaun Dale, 34, a children's fitness consultant in New York City, "but the first thing they did to us was the mile run. It sucked. Everybody hated it."

The answer, just about every fitness expert agrees, is to reinstate gym classes--but not the old-fashioned kind, in which only the toughest and most talented children thrive. "You have to give them something fun," says Washington, "something they can be successful at. You can't have a child who can't kick a ball well and say, 'O.K., you can't kick, so you go sit on the sidelines.'" Instead schools are starting to turn to something called New P.E., an informal physical education--reform movement whose best known advocate is Phil Lawler, a middle-school gym teacher in Naperville, Ill. Rather than have everyone play basketball or soccer, teachers offer a variety of activities, many of them nontraditional, and let the kids choose.

So while some students are Rollerblading, for example, others will be rock-climbing, kickboxing, doing Tai Chi or yoga or aerobic dance. It hardly matters what they do as long as it holds their interest and keeps them moving--and if it's something they can keep doing when school is behind them, so much the better. As the New P.E. movement takes root--one school district at a time, for the most part--both Texas and California have launched statewide programs that advise schools on how to set up gym classes that promote fitness.

Some communities, meanwhile, are working to encourage fitness on the way to and from school. In Marin County, Calif., a promotional campaign boosted the number of kids walking or riding bikes to school from 21% to 38% in the first two years of a pilot program. In Chicago, adult volunteers in a program called "Walking School Buses" help groups of kids feel safe traveling to school on foot. And in New York City, the Safe Routes to School program www.saferoutestoschool.org is re-engineering traffic patterns to reduce the risk that students will get hurt.

Once kids get home, though, they're often back in an environment in which physical activity doesn't come naturally--not only because they're surrounded by electronic distractions but also because parents feel that playing outside isn't safe. And it doesn't help if the parents aren't active. "When I talk to people about this," says Dr. Richard Carmona, the U.S. Surgeon General, "I say, 'If your mom and dad are overweight, you'll probably be overweight too. On the other hand, if Mom and Dad are out doing physical things like swimming and bike riding, and it's an active family, chances are children will model their behavior after you.'"

In the end, parents' influence and involvement may count for more than anything else. They have the power to insist that the TV be shut off. They can walk their kids to school and lobby school districts to reinstate physical education and to remove junk food from the halls and cafeterias. And like Biz Johnson-Brown's parents, they're the ones who can start their kids in fitness activities at an early age. Not every parent can afford Gymboree, but local recreation departments and YMCAs and YWCAs often offer low-cost programs that accomplish the same thing.

Or don't even bother with a program, says Dr. Howard Taras, a pediatrician at the University of California at San Diego and a member of the Task Force on Obesity for the American Academy of Pediatrics. "Toddlers naturally push themselves to the limits of skill development," he says. "They enjoy exhausting themselves with aerobic challenges. So provide a toddler with a ball, a tricycle, a large cardboard box, a crack in the sidewalk, be there for a little light supervision--and they will find their own way to amuse themselves." --Reported by Coco Masters/New York

With reporting by Reported by Coco Masters/New York