How the hell does a 5 year old get that far down the road of obesity that they need something like this to be done. https://nutritionfacts.org/2017/07/18/even-children-are-getting-gastric-bypasses-now/ I swear, that movie WALL-E was not just some fictional gag.....that is really what the future of the human race is doomed to look like.
Parents need to kick their kids out of the house during the day and make them go play. Man, I'm glad I lived in the country when I was a kid. No cable, no video games. The only thing we could find to entertain ourselves was out in the woods or down at the creek. We spent a lot time catching critters...
I live near Cincinnati. We first lived in a subdivision on a hill. Our kids had a tough time riding bikes or playing any type of sport because of the hills. And we never saw the neighbor kids in the street - which was strange to me. I grew up in a neighborhood and very much enjoyed being outside with my friends. We have since moved to about 12 acres (6 wooded) surrounded by subdivisions. we have about 1200' of paved flat driveway. Last night we rode dirt bikes and quads, caught a snake, rode bikes, picked tomatoes from the garden, and jumped on the trampoline with the sprinkler underneath. No cable. We live entirely different than our neighbors. I love it, but the neighbors certainly hate our motorized toys. Our kids seem much more happy, more confident, and more well rounded. I hate that it took acreage for our kids to go outside - that seems a bit backwards to me. But it was seriously hard to find neighbor kids who didn't play video games for most of the day.
More like Idiocracy. I always thought Mike Judge made entertaining movies, I never realized they were documentaries. First Office Space, now that one.
I grew up the same way you're raising your kids. I'd like mine to grow up the same way. We would go out all day, ride bikes, hike, set things on fire and get in trouble, look for fruits, chase chickens, catch crabs and fish, and generally run around. We could've been dead or kidnapped but our parents let us run around for hours unsupervised. I don't know if there's anywhere like that anymore. That wasn't very long ago either. I'll never let my kids become video game players, but it's definitely hard. I live in Los Angeles and don't know of any neighborhoods where the kids roam free like we did. There are a couple places where I've seen kids out riding their bikes without adults, but it's rare. If you drive by a playground these days you rarely even see children. It's pretty sad. Seems like the only way to get them outside to socialize with other little people is in structured activities. At least there's opportunity for them to be active with other kids but it sucks that it has to be organized. Technology has definitely changed things for the worse in many ways.
