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Whatever happened to Tiddlywinks?


Randomguy

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The small amount of physical activity kids in America do today is depressing. When I coached high school cross country, a few overweight students approached me in my classroom and asked if they could go out for the team so they could lose weight.  I enthusiastically said yes but, in addition to passing the grades/physical/parent permission/insurance requirements, they would have to actually be part of the team and slowly build up their fitness and running ability and run in 3 mile races before the end of the season.  The teens lost weight. They didn't get skinny, but their arm, shoulder, and leg muscles got toned so nicely that, in each of the following years, I had 6-12 overweight kids come out in August for cross country.  It was easy to see, even among the "big boned" kids in the school hallways and classrooms, who was getting any exercise and it was a much smaller amount in the 90's and 00's than in earlier times.

When I was a kid, the main forms of play involved movement like running, climbing, etc.  There is so much less of it now - both because parents are afraid to allow young kids to play unsupervised in today's sick America and because of the addiction to online games.

Now, instead of several of us each grabbing a stick and a trash can lid and pretending we were the Spartans defending Thermopylae against invisible Persian attackers - which we had just learned about in 5th grade history class - we work out the strategy on a computer grid and have a mage cast fire spells on the enemy.

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