Searchers Post: Sedentarism in Adolescence

After lecture this week, I was sitting and thinking about how much I sit, ironically. I spend the majority of my day in a chair. Class, studying, work, driving to work, studying, are all activities that I find to be exhausting during the day ironically.

I was thinking that this is becoming increasingly more true as we became adults. The time that I spend sitting, as an adult is much more than I spent sitting when I was in elementary school. It seemed like we were always moving to do a different activity, like going to recess or gym or just moving around the classroom. This didn’t even include the after school activities like soccer practice and cops and playing tag in the backyard. I think that this has changed significantly even from the few years that I was in elementary school. I tutor at an elementary school and I asked one of the boys I was tutoring what he had done the day before and he told me he had played video games and watched TV. Our society is becoming more and more sedentary as those are the habits that we are also instill in our children.

I was researching sedentarism in adolescents and came across this blog from the Scientific American. It said that a recent study was conducted that showed that children today spend more than 6 hours a day in front of a TV screen. Additionally, they spend 70% of the school day being inactive. I think this demonstrates what ideas of health we are teaching the next generation and we need to adjust. Activeness in school is something that we have control over and need to make a change in the amount of activities and active breaks that children get so they can be consistently more active throughout the day and hopefully throughout their lives.