Let’s get our kids moving their bodies NOW!

Three cheers for the study and article in USA Today by Amanda Gardner, HealthDay, "Experts: Recess improves student behavior." It's about time! I remember when my very bright, energized, and engaged son stood up after sitting at a desk for several hours and got scolded. I told his teacher, 'These kids need to move once in a while to keep their brains active." She disagreed. I am sure happy to see experts now waking up to how important it is to give our kids time to move throughout the day.

"Some short-sighted people thought that cutting back on time spent on physical education to spend more time drilling for tests would improve test scores," says Howell Wechsler, director of the Division of Adolescent and School Health for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "But in fact there are a lot of studies that show that more time for PE and other physical activity help improve academic performance."

I am also glad that the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, Ryan Seacrest of American Idol, and our First Lady as well as many others, are addressing the problems that we have around the ways that we feed our children which are causing an epidemic of obese, unhealthy kids. While bringing awareness to the problem, improving school lunch programs and encouraging parents and children to make less trips to the fast food restaurants is a great start, ultimately we need to teach children a lot more about their body and how to take care of it.

Educate our children about their bodies

As a parent, the author of the book What's Your Body Telling You?, a child advocate, the teacher of a workshop titled, "Boosting Your Child's BQ: How to Empower and Not Discourage Our Children's Innate Body Wisdom", I believe that we need a major overhaul to how we educate our children about the bodies they live in, at home and in school.

In a culture that places greater value on thinking than feeling and emphasizes reason over gut-knowing, our children's bodies' important messages are often suppressed or simply go dormant. As parents and educators, it's important to teach and encourage our children to trust their bodies' messages -- such as butterflies in the stomach, body temperature changes, clenching of fists, nervous sweats, etc. -- to navigate their everyday experiences with greater ease and insight into situations that could be potentially harmful.

Child-rearing, socialization and education processes through every stage of our lives have overlooked or outright discouraged the development of BQ (body quotient). Many of our children are trained to ignore their built-in bio-feedback system. We often unconsciously train our kids to disconnect from their body feelings and somatic intelligence in order to fit in and please others. When a child expresses physical or emotional discomfort and is repeatedly met with frustration or disapproval, he or she soon learns that it isn't safe or acceptable to feel. S/he gets the message, loud and clear -- your body isn't reliable -- and begins to adapt and conform to misguided demands and expectations. The cost to the child is tremendous; both spontaneous self-expression and the simple joy of being are all but lost.

Life is not an out of body experience

Our children also don't learn about body wisdom, body intelligence, or body awareness in school. Sit still and be quiet is the rule of the day and woe to the kid who was unable to conform. What if children were taught how to manage their energy with correct breathing rather than be commanded day after day to do something as unnatural as sit still? By high school age, young people could readily learn basic awareness practices, or exercises for relaxation and stress reduction. At best, children get involved in sports, but many merely go through the motions of a physical education class and barely learn how to do push ups and sit ups. Our educational system is so outwardly focused and places so little emphasis on self-awareness that most of us were led away from the body and became desensitized to feelings. Our natural instincts began to atrophy and shrink.

Misleading information comes in many forms-some more benign than others-leading to a general alienation from the body. I was told that if I made a wish while driving through a tunnel and held my breath until reaching the end then my wish would come true. Not a good lesson about how to use the breath and body for manifesting what you desire. What were you taught about your body that still affects how you relate to it?

Added to this is the increasing challenge of staying connected to the body in a high-tech, stressful world that all but erases our animal nature. As we have evolved into high-tech beings, we have abandoned the body by living virtual lives that over-emphasize the mind. Computers and automobiles dominate our lives. Physical activity falls by the wayside as we walk less and drive more. We move less and think more. We play less and surf the web more. Indeed, our primary forms of entertainment find us sitting in front of some kind of screen and, unfortunately, "high definition" does not refer to the effect on our muscle tone.

Virtual Living

Children have become virtual experts who spend hours watching the tube, playing video games, emailing, text-messaging, and socializing on internet sites. They hardly move as they stare at the screen. The cost of this can be seen in a group of ten-year-olds who went with my friend to the beach not long ago. The boys elected to sit in a minivan and pass on the sand and waves because they preferred playing their handheld computer Nintendo DS!

When I was in Japan I learned that over one million teens never leave their rooms, hooked on computers and virtual relationships only. I also hear, here in the U.S., more stories about kids who have social phobias and only feel comfortable interacting through Facebook and text messaging. So, let's keep getting our kids outside and interacting live and in person. I was sitting at a restaurant the other night and saw a family of four -- the parents were eating and talking while their two children had nothing to do with them as they were texting throughout the entire dinner. And again, this forms terrible eating habits too!

Parents, teachers let's unite and get our kids moving, feeling and expressing again.

What do you think? Do you feel like children today are diconnected from their bodies? How does technology play a part? How do you model a body-connected lifestyle... or do you?