Technology should not rob us of active and productive life
Min Atek
What you need to know:
At school, children have an established routine. They wake up early, probably have regular physical activities including cleaning their school premises, but most importantly, they play outdoors
“How old is your child?” The doctor asked. “She is nine years old,” the mother replied. “Nine?’ the visibly surprised doctor exclaimed. “Yes. She will make 10 next year,” she responded emphatically.
The nine years appeared rather few for the physique that the relatively heavy child carried. She could have easily passed for 14 or 15. One of the things we picked from two years of lockdown was physical weight. Children in particular became serious victims because they spent two long years, largely indoors eating convenient instant foods and playing video games.
I would never appreciated how our day to day routine activities and running around affects our overall well-being and health. Maybe it is actually true that we were not created to be idle and inactive. That we were created with legs and arms so we could move, be active and productive.
Modern science and modern living have taken away a lot of our continual exercise. Whereas many today sit and work behind a computer, our ancestors used to wake up early to go work their gardens from sunrise until midday.
The impact of the reduced activities when we were in the lockdown increased body weight significantly and that brought its own set of challenges. When the time to go back to school came, many of the children would not fit in their previous uniforms.
At school, children have an established routine. They wake up early, probably have regular physical activities including cleaning their school premises, but most importantly, they play outdoors. At school, there is no room to be couch potatoes, lazying around for extended periods on phones and gadgets, playing static games.
At school, they run around, play with each other, fall down, get up, run to class, run from class to the dining area and so much more activity. These repeated movements keep children engaged, which improves their overall well-being and vitality. They are pushed to exercise their physical bodies and minds for intellectual development.
Now that we are free to move and work away from home, parents too are encouraged to shade off excess weight that came from working in the comfort of their homes, where the only movement was to the kitchen to pick food to eat.
Let us not let the new advancements in technology and science rob us of our natural ability to be lean, to be active and productive for our own good.
