Are our children less safe at home than we think?

The raising of children is full of paradoxes, and for American parents this is a tough one; in order to make them safer we need to kick our children out of doors into the world we have come to fear as parents. Home, in some ways, is becoming more dangerous for our children than the great outdoors.

That is because the plague of obesity and being overweight now afflicting many of our children represents a far greater threat to their health than the predators we fear stalk our neighborhoods. This plague of plenty has its origins in our homes, in the place where parents determine what children eat, how much time they get to sit in front of television and computer screens, and how much time they spend running around outside.

If you doubt the home has become a dangerous place to many of our children, consider this; unless its health status improves, many of this generation of children will probably have a shorter life expectancy than their parents. That has never happened before in American history. The shortened life expectancy is due to wider waistlines, which in turn are due to too many calories and too little physical activity. We are feeding and sitting some of our kids to earlier deaths.

For most children, inside home is not where calories get burned in the inferno of the physically active child. Running, biking, pig piles, snowball fights, snow-angel making, stickball, swimming, hiking, and setting leaves on fire with … (never mind that one) all happen out of doors.

Activity in the home for most of our children is often screen time – computers, television, video games, etc. Homework may not be screen time but it and screen time are rear time. For the average American child, rear time amounts to several hours per day.

Fear of crime against children is cited by many parents as one of the main reasons they do not encourage their children to spend more time outside being active, to ride to school, to “Go play with your friends,” etc. We are afraid of the stranger kidnapping our kids, of the sexual predator lurking around the corner, of cars on busy streets, and much more, and we are afraid of these things despite evidence that our children are actually safer on most of our streets than they have been in thirty years.

Violent crimes against children, for example, have been dropping for decades, and nationally stranger abductions of children number perhaps a few hundred per year. The vast majority of abducted children are taken by one parent from the other. According to the Centers for Disease Control, of all kidnappings of children, less than four in 100 occur in the vicinity of school.

Despite this only about 16 percent of children now walk or bike to school, largely because some parents are afraid to allow their children to walk to school. Forty years ago almost half of all children walked to school (proving once again that things were tougher when I was a kid, when the walk to school was uphill both ways).

What will it take to get our children out of doors and burning off more calories to a healthy weight? Lots – inside the home and outside. Inside the home it takes first and foremost a parental commitment to a maximum screen time of two hours per day per child. After that, for growing children we have to shut it off, boot it down, whack the cord off if necessary, but make two hours the maximum. Screen time is too seductive, to children and parents, to allow discretion on this issue. If we really want to love our children we need to be mean about this issue. We might also apply the two hour screen time maximum to ourselves (except during football season, of course, since watching football on TV is, ah … patriotic).

If parents need to push children outside, the rest of us need to make the out of doors more appealing and safer for children it is the job of the rest of us to make the out of doors appealing and fun for children. We need neighborhoods that help keep an eye on children and parents who shepherd each others’ children to school, sidewalks and other safe ways to places children want to go, roads through residential neighborhoods with speed bumps and other traffic flow controls, parks and playgrounds that are inviting and safe, recreation and after-school programs for children, etc. We need trails that connect great places in our cities and towns, so that we can bike and walk from one to another. We need to take our communities back from the car.

We need the media to stop hyping crime news as though crime news is the only thing happening in the world other than fires, crashes, disasters, weather and sports. Crime may sell but that is a poor excuse for a steady diet of it on television. We deserve better, and should demand it, either by pressuring local media or turning off our TVs.

Most of all, getting our children to be active outside will take the activism of parents, communities and government. We will not get them out of doors by yapping about it, and if we sit on our rears on this issue, so will our children. And while our children are out there, we might join them; we could use a little physical activity out of doors ourselves.

Erik Steele, D.O., a physician in Bangor, is chief medical officer of Eastern Maine Healthcare Systems and is on the staff of several hospital emergency rooms in the region.