Hey, Fat Lazy Adults, Stop Slagging Off British Kids

Whenever I’m feeling bad about myself, I like to beat up a small child. Children are pretty much useless, and I’m better than them in almost every way – richer, stronger, more successful, better at sex, bigger brain. Next to almost any child, I’m totally brilliant, and any child better than me at anything is a freak who probably has no friends. Believing this boosts my self-esteem no end.

If that makes me sound a bit sociopathic, well, I’m just a product of my time. In modern Britain, middle-aged people love smack-talking children. Hell, it’s practically the national pastime now. People don’t do this to their own children, of course – that would be cruel and wrong – but other people’s children, the ones from the lower classes that you hear on the news talking improper. Those kids are pathetic, they say. They’re stupid, ill behaved, unhealthy and achieve nothing outside of the computer games that will eventually turn them into violent sex criminals.

It’s not difficult to get the impression that children are under fire from all corners. A recent bit of kiddy-baiting comes courtesy of the American Heart Association, who’ve released a study showing that kids these days can’t run as fast as their parent’s generation could, back in the day. Or at least, they’ve released a press briefing about a study. The work is apparently being presented at the AHA’s 2013 “Scientific Sessions”, but their website doesn’t bother pointing to any actual research, and comments asking for it remain unanswered. The details therefore are pretty scant – today’s youth are about 90 seconds slower over a mile than those of 30 years ago, and 15 percent less fit “from a cardiovascular standpoint”.

Ninety seconds sounds like a lot, and it would be if you were an Olympic athlete polishing off four-minute miles in your tea break. Most of us aren’t athletes though, and running a mile takes a relatively long time. The Cooper test, used by the military to evaluate recruits’ fitness, would expect an average 14-year-old girl to run a mile in about 12 minutes, for example. At that sort of scale, 90 seconds isn’t quite as bad as it sounds, and a small amount of training can improve your times remarkably quickly. When I started running recently – for the first time in absolutely ages – I cut more than 100 seconds off my time per mile in the first three weeks.

That relates to a second issue with this, which is that we’re using a simple proxy – running speed – to measure quite a complex thing – health. The study’s authors themselves point out that a lot of the difference (up to two thirds of it, in fact) is down to kids simply weighing more, and therefore requiring more effort to travel the same distance. What they’re really saying, then, is that kids now are heavier than they were 30 years ago, and less active in their teenage years. Whether that’s actually a problem or not, time will tell.

Of course this isn’t anything particularly new. Headlines like this pop up every other month. “Modern life is ‘producing a generation of weaklings’,” wailed the Guardian in 2011. A widely-reported study by the University of California, San Diego in 2008 warned that children’s activity levels were dropping hugely in teenagers as they grow up.

It seems pretty widely accepted that modern children are fatter, slower, lazier and less fit than previous generations. On the flip side, my parents never learned how to program a computer. Does this decline in fitness actually matter, or do we just have different priorities now that we’re not sending kids off to dig coal, plough fields or bother Germans?

Let’s assume it does, and that these studies are accurate. The biggest problem I have with the discussion around these studies isn’t that they’re wrong, but that we’re using fat, lazy children to avoid talking about the real issue in our society – fat, lazy adults. You can have the healthiest kids in the world, but it’s going to make fuck all difference in the long term if the moment they leave high school they pile on the “fresher 15” and head off to a sedentary life sitting in offices eating crisps and readymeals.

If kids are lazy, it’s adults that are making them that way, with perhaps the worst example being the school run, a daily exercise in national mass stupidity. Parents who regularly drive their kids less than a mile to school without good reason are dangerous morons, who should be publicly named, shamed, mocked. Children should be given buckets of eggs and rotten tomatoes to throw at their vehicles. They block our roads, threaten the safety of other children and make their own kids fat and lazy, impeding their performance in school. School-drivers should be treated with the same contempt as drunk-drivers, and yet more and more grown-ups have deluded themselves into believing that it is an acceptable parenting practice.

A recent YouGov survey found that a quarter of adults walk for no more than one hour a week, while 43 percent walk less than two hours per week, a pitifully small amount of exercise that sets a terrible example for kids to follow. That’s not surprising in a society full of people with an unhealthy addiction to cars they don’t really need, where pedestrians are a nuisance and cyclists are treated with such contempt that a woman who openly boasted about nearly killing one received only a tiny fine and a few points on her license.

Suzanne Moore’s latest Guardian column sets out the extent to which British society has demonised and patronised the young: “They have been characterised as overly sexualised, inherently stupid, hooked to crappy talent shows, computer games, screens, lacking in basic skills, lazy, rude and vain. And hyper-consumerist,” she wrote. We can add fat and unhealthy to this list, but what’s remarkable is how much projection there is in that description. It’s not kids that are fat and lazy, it’s our society, and our children are simply a reflection of that. But it’s far easier to moan about “kids these days” than it is to accept that it’s us grown ups who need to change.

Follow Martin on Twitter: @mjrobbins

Previously – We Should Probably Stop Leaving Our Rubbish All Over Space