There is a quality that is becoming widespread among the youth of many countries, and that is that we often see that young people, rather than a fresh and energetic attitude, are choosing to live like hermits and in a sedentary lifestyle. In other words, we are facing a generation of «young-old».
The writer Leonor Skenazy warned in her most recent Wall Street Journal column on this problem, and compared 19-year-olds with 60-year-olds, at least in terms of how much they look alike their sedentary lifestyles. She talks about different studies that have measured how much activity, from moderate to vigorous, is practiced by different strata of society. Many of these studies have uncovered what seems to be a general symptom of our times: the decline in physical activity among young people.
The author of one of the US studies, Vadim Zipunnikov, describes how activity levels drop «alarmingly» in adolescence, and that by the age of 19 young people become agitated as much as a 60-year-old. , because they carry out as much activity as these.
Why is this happening?
One of the hypotheses raised by Skenazy is that the person responsible is the overprotective culture of the parents, who watch the children in everything and decide on all their activities, for which they keep them close, playing on an iPad or cell phone, locked in the car while they (the parents) do their daily activities. To this is added the paranoia of not letting the children out to play, which unfortunately occurs due to the violence to which they may be subjected. Thus, a sedentary lifestyle is a condition that is cultivated from childhood and that gradually degenerates in severity during puberty and adolescence.
In Mexico, these factors are even more evident, since parental overprotection is rooted in the actual insecurity in the cities, which has tended to increase, which affects the level of activity that children can have when playing outside their homes. In addition, other factors typical of modern life have an impact, such as the use of the car, poor nutrition, and the “digitization” of life in general, which makes us dependent on screens. But in Mexico, for example, we cannot demand more physical activity from our children and adolescents, first, if we ourselves are not an example. INEGI calculates that 56.4 percent of the urban population in Mexico over 18 years of age is physically inactive, a daunting figure. On the other hand, if there is no infrastructure in schools, nor enough physical education teachers who really carry out a culture around the performance of sports, the problem that only 1.41% of adolescents between the ages of 12 and 19 use their free time to play sports or some physical exercise cannot be counteracted.
precisely the promote sports in schools they would be a great solution, as Skenazy also suggests in his column. She suggests extending the hours and allowing children to stay longer at school to specifically do sports activities, which also «is one of the fundamental factors so that they can achieve a good physical, psychological and social statebecause sport favors the acquisition of healthy lifestyles that will last until adulthood”, explains Verónica Sánchez Muñoz, medical director of the Center for Bionic and Robotic Evaluation and Rehabilitation (CEREBRO).
Dealing with this in a comprehensive way, with solutions that involve the social, the physical, and the mental, will help our children and young people to opt for exercise to say goodbye to stress —because little physical activity generates cortisol, the stress hormone—, as well as anxiety, obesity and other consequences that a sedentary lifestyle brings with it.
*Images: stock
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