Kindy Karate

Babies rock their bodies and kick their feet, and toddlers love to move around, dance, climb and jump. Many older kids enjoy organised sports as well as playground games and a bit of rough & tumble. All of this is not only great fun, and an important part of play & learning,  it’s also essential for healthy growth and development.

Encouraging those kids who don't enjoy organised sport to take up some other form of everyday physical activity will help them stay healthy.

Physical activity provides your child with many lasting health benefits, including:

• strong bones and muscles
• healthy heart, lungs and arteries
• improved coordination, balance, posture and flexibility
• a reduced risk of becoming overweight or obese
• a reduced risk of later developing heart disease, cancer and diabetes (type 2 diabetes is increasingly being found in adolescents).

Active kids are also more likely to:

• be confident and have enhanced self-esteem
• be happy and relaxed
• sleep well
• concentrate at school
• get along with others and make friends easily
• share, take turns and cooperate
• feel like they belong.

Active children typically become active adults. By encouraging your child to be physically active,

you’re helping to establish a healthy lifelong habit

.

This is a very important article that needs to be read by all adults with the focus on the children of today, our leaders of tomorrow!

As role models and leaders the future is in our hands.

One out of three children is now diagnosed as obese. As if this is not enough bad news, it is not the whole story. Kids who develop weight problems at an early age have also many other disadvantages to cope with. Among those are learning disabilities and attention disorders. Unfortunately, not enough attention has been paid so far to the negative effects of obesity on the developmental health of children, not only with regards to their bodies but their minds as well.

Recent research on this subject has concluded that there is a strong connection between a “sedentary lifestyle at a young age and the ability to learn and achieve.” When overweight children become physically more active, they not only lose weight, but their thinking and problem-solving skills also show signs of improvement.

Catherine Davis, a clinical health psychologist leading researcher of the study, says that chronic sedentary behaviour compromises children’s ability to achieve. By contrast, there is evidence that regular physical exercise can be very helpful, if not instrumental, in overcoming these limitations.

Davis believes that her findings are supported by hard science. Over 170 overweight children between the ages of 7 and 11 were involved in her study. Half of them were enrolled in a daily exercise regimen of 20 to 40 minutes; the other half did not exercise at all. Subsequent MRI scans showed that the exercising kids had a significant increase of activity in parts of the brain that are associated with analytic thinking and        problem-solving. The others didn’t. Moreover, the children who exercised longer, up to 40 minutes, did better in cognitive tests than those who exercised less.

None of this should come as a surprise. Children need both physical and mental stimulation to grow up healthy. Unfortunately, there are still too many misconceptions out there about the right ways to meet those needs. Physical education (PE) has long been treated as an expendable part of the curriculum in public schools. Teaching for the sole purpose of improving test scores in “key” subjects, like math, science and reading, are common place now. Parents who want to enroll their kids in athletic activities are on their own. Those who live in low-income neighbourhoods have few, if any, opportunities to exercise or even play outside. Where the streets are not safe and public parks or sport facilities are non-existent, parents have little choice but ask their kids to stay inside their homes.

The tragedy is that we know what needs to be done to turn our childhood obesity epidemic around. But still there is not enough political will to set our priorities straight. We are talking about the next generation of Adults who will in all likelihood live less healthy and shorter lives than their parents. There should be no such thing as overweight children. It is unnatural and we, as a society, should not have allowed this to happen. It is too late now to lament the past, but it is not too late to take action on behalf of the weakest and most vulnerable among us.

Sources: Catherine Davis, Ph.D., Georgia Prevention Institute, Georgia Health Sciences University, Augusta.

Science Daily 

— Researchers have found an association between physical fitness and the brain in 9- and 10-year-old children: Those who are more fit tend to have a bigger hippocampus and perform better on a test of memory than their less-fit peers.

The new study, which used magnetic resonance imaging to measure the relative size of specific structures in the brains of 49 child subjects, appears in the journal Brain Research.

"This is the first study I know of that has used MRI measures to look at differences in brain between kids who are fit and kids who aren't fit," said University of Illinois psychology professor and Beckman Institute director Art Kramer, who led the study with doctoral student Laura Chaddock and kinesiology and community health professor Charles Hillman. "Beyond that, it relates those measures of brain structure to cognition."

The study focused on the hippocampus, a structure tucked deep in the brain, because it is known to be important in learning and memory. Previous studies in older adults and in animals have shown that exercise can increase the size of the hippocampus. A bigger hippocampus is associated with better performance on spatial reasoning and other cognitive tasks.

"In animal studies, exercise has been shown to specifically affect the hippocampus, significantly increasing the growth of new neurons and cell survival, enhancing memory and learning, and increasing molecules that are involved in the plasticity of the brain," Chaddock said.

Rather than relying on second-hand reports of children's physical activity level, the researchers measured how efficiently the subjects used oxygen while running on a treadmill.

"This is the gold standard measure of fitness," Chaddock said.

The physically fit children were "much more efficient than the less-fit children at utilizing oxygen," Kramer said.

When they analyzed the MRI data, the researchers found that the physically fit children tended to have bigger hippocampal volume -- about 12 percent bigger relative to total brain size -- than their out-of-shape peers.

The children who were in better physical condition also did better on tests of relational memory -- the ability to remember and integrate various types of information -- than their less-fit peers.

"Higher fit children had higher performance on the relational memory task, higher fit children had larger hippocampal volumes, and in general, children with larger hippocampal volumes had better relational memory," Chaddock said.

Further analyses indicated that a bigger hippocampus boosted performance on the relational memory task.

"If you remove hippocampal volume from the equation," Chaddock said, "the relationship between fitness and memory decreases."

The new findings suggest that interventions to increase childhood physical activity could have an important effect on brain development, Kramer said.

"We knew that experience and environmental factors and socioeconomic status all impact brain development," he said.

"If you get some lousy genes from your parents, you can't really fix that, and it's not easy to do something about your economic status. But here's something that we can do something about," Kramer said.