The next hub is obesity, so we know that this is a very serious problem now, 17% of our children are obese, 34% are significantly overweight, five-fold increase over 25 years. So we\u2019ve tried lots of these campaigns with very little success, very little effectiveness now, where we\u2019re going to educate these children on healthy eating or the need to exercise. The problem of obesity really doesn\u2019t have anything to do with will-power, in fact, introducing the concept of will-power makes everything worse, and the reason is that when we look at the stressors on a child, when we look at the sorts of things that are draining the child\u2019s nervous system, one of the biggest is negative emotion, negative emotion has a huge draining affect, and that\u2019s things like anxiety, frustration, shame. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So now, if you start telling the child, or unconsciously conveying the message to the child \u2018you\u2019re obese because you\u2019re weak, you\u2019re obese because you lack will-power to resist that extra donut\u2019, whatever it is, now this child, on top of everything else that this poor kid is struggling with in life, we\u2019ve now saddled this kid with strong negative emotion, which is going to further drain the system, so we\u2019re doing the worst things we could. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
When we look at these kids we\u2019re starting to see a fairly significant pattern, the research is still at a very early stage, but what we\u2019re seeing is a recurring theme of poor sensory integration. And we\u2019re seeing a lot of kids that have poor sensory integration, and it may have something to do with modern life, it may have something to do with, as we look at the drivers of strong self-integration, the biggest driver is play, the biggest driver is physical play, it\u2019s under conditions of physical play where the child is driven by strong positive affect, the fun of playing, and play is the most energizing of anything we can do, it\u2019s the opposite of a negative emotion, it fuels the system, under this strong affect-driven system, you know fun, curiosity, whatever it is, the child is constantly stretching his body, the child is constantly doing things that create this integration, that create; the brain responds to the challenges we place on it, but if I have a child now that\u2019s spending an inordinate amount of time watching a video that\u2019s supposedly going to make him bright, and not playing, not running around, not exploring, not discovering, on top of everything else what we\u2019re doing is, we are, we are short circuiting, we\u2019re blocking those necessary physical experiences which drive sensory integration in the early years of life. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now this poor kid is locked in a vicious circle because of the poor sensory integration, that child is going to avoid physical experiences as he starts to enter preschool or kindergarten. This is the kid now who is going to be drawn to things like the video game, and so now everything is starting to exacerbate, he\u2019s avoiding those very experiences namely running around, playing, etc., which we know, of all the things we\u2019ve studied, have the greatest effect on balancing the self-regulatory system. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The next hub is obesity, so we know that this is a very serious problem now, 17% of our children are obese, 34% are significantly overweight, five-fold increase over 25 years. So we\u2019ve tried lots of these campaigns with very little success, very little effectiveness now, where we\u2019re going to educate these children on healthy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"template-text-only.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1856","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1856","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1856"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1856\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1857,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1856\/revisions\/1857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}