Week 8-Foreign Newspaper Posting-"For the Children..."

http://www.timesofmalta.com/core/article.php?id=216861

Why children must play outdoors
Ariadne Massa



My first response to this was "Oh brother!". I can hardly believe that there would be a "Commissioner for Children". Western society seems to have an odd fascination for trying everything cosmetic to make the lives of little Johnny or Susie better. We continually wring our hands over how “the children” are managing, but all the while our real agenda is showing, we want instant success with our children, but in actuality we do not want to be bothered by the hard work entailed in raising them. Not sure you believe me? Just re-read the sentence where Ms.Camilleri says that ‘parents yearned to find new exciting alternatives for their children and many frequently called her asking for advice on where to take them to play”. What pseudo psycho babble is that? They YEARN to find exciting alternatives? Can you imagine parents in the past saying they YEARNED to find exciting places for their children to play? Our parents would’ve just told us to go outside and find something to do or they would find us some work to do. Until recently it had never been thought that it was the job of parents to entertain or be sure that their children are being entertained while at play. What has changed in our society that parents feel like they must play the part of a sort of cruise director for their children? Furthermore, if these parentally brain dead people feel it is so important that they “YEARN” to find exciting places for their children to play, why don’t they go out with their children and find places for them to play themselves? My guess is because they are indeed lazy, they want wonderful well behaved children to magically appear, or at least they want someone else to do any work that might be involved in doing that. So they call up some government official to find out what they should do.

Furthermore, her contention that Maltese children would play outside more instead of spending so much time in sedentary activities if there were more open space is probablywrong. Parents should be in control of how much time their children spend on sedentary activities, since the children are said already to be obese, it appears that the parents aren’t making the children turn off the computers and go outside now, so why would more places to play give the parents more authority to amake their children go outside? . Also, her contention "Most children who constantly tune in to television stations showing extreme sports crave the chance of trying their hand at certain disciplines, albeit on a smaller, less dangerous scale." is odd indeed. If the children "crave" a chance to try these sports, why aren't they trying them? In my experience, when children "crave" something, they won't pine away about it for long, they will do it.

In summary, I would have to say that it isn’t likely that anything will change even if there are more places for the children to play.