Schools and Parents Contribute to Students Ill Health and Failure to Attend College
Combine poverty, readily available poor choices of sugar snacks and drinks at schools and recreation areas, the sedentary lifestyle of television and computer entertained children, and high carb/high fat diets at home with the female body and problems quickly arise. The younger a child is when they begin to lose muscle and replace it with fat, the harder it becomes to stop the tide of obesity in middle school and high school. The potential of these children is squashed out with shame and deep seated emotional scarring by stigmatization and peer ostracizing.
According to a recent study from The University of Texas at Austin, obese girls are half as likely to attend college as non-obese girls.(Crosnoe, R. 2007) Certainly, the ability to change people's bad habits and lives as witnessed in the popular television show "The Biggest Loser" is available to a few lucky contestants. If our school systems must step back from the importance of year after year of memorizing important data that is now available in seconds on the computer and switch their curriculum. Introduce health classes that actually produce hard bodied, drug free and alcohol free young people, parenting classes that produce skilled parents with knowledge of my "Compassionate Parenting" based on child development markers, and practical money savvy business minds.
Make these mandatory and prerequisites to the important but advanced classes like trigonometry, chemistry and Spanish that few students need or use in their future. I am proposing that the schools spend time creating strong healthy bodies with organic nutrition, stretching, dance, cardio and weight lifting every day and watch their discipline problems, drop out rates, drug and alcohol use, and boredom levels plummet. Children left to sit in rows for seven hours a day fed sugar and fake wheat food are dying, not thriving.
Dr. Molly Barrow holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and is the author of the new book, Matchlines: A Revolutionary New Way of Looking at Relationships and Making the Right Choices in Love, ISBN 159507158X. She is an authority on relationship and psychological topics, a member of the American Psychological Association and a licensed mental health counselor. Dr. Molly has appeared as an expert in the film, My Suicide, documentaries Ready to Explode and KTLA Impact, NBC news, PBS In Focus, WBZT talk radio and in O Magazine, Psychology Today, Newsday, The Nest, MSN.com, Yahoo, Match.com, N Magazine, Womens Health and Womens World. Please visit: http://www.DrMollyBarrow.com for Match Lines System for Successful Relationships
