I agree with you on most of this.
Food choice is definitely related to obesity in kids. There are kids who don’t eat correctly or healthily.
Lack of physical activity is also an issue. I can remember going outside in the summers and only coming home for lunch and dinner. We kids ran around the neighborhood with our friends all day. Something kids don’t seem to do anymore.
The part that I have issue with is the following:
“more and more kids being diagnosed with things never heard of 30 years ago. When I was in grade school, no one had allergies. Maybe one or two kids had asthma. ADD? Autism? ADHD? It was unheard of then.”
I knew a few kids with asthma. I think environmental issue are far more prevalent causes at this point. Lets face it, there are far more things mucking up our air nowadays.
I was also in school 30 years ago (graduated high school in 1981.) Can you honestly say you did not know kids with any of these issues? They have always been around.
I definitely knew kids who would be diagnosed with ADD or ADHD. They were the ones always in trouble with my teachers for not sitting still, talking too much, and not doing their work. They drove my teachers nuts and spent a lot of time out in the hallway or in the corner of the classroom so as not to distract the rest of us. (Rodney and Sonia are the two foremost in my mind.)
I knew kids with allergies to various substances. Most specifically, I remember a friend, Beth, who couldn’t eat strawberries. I remember this because I loved strawberries and could not imagine going through life not being able to eat them. I felt so sorry for her.
I knew kids who today would be diagnosed with Asperger syndrome. They were kind of the loners of the class – very smart, yet socially awkward.
(Aspergers was not widely recognized as a specific diagnosis until 1981.) In this case, I am thinking about Dave and Steve. Both brilliant in many ways, yet unorganized, and socially inept. I always tried to be nice to those boys since they did not seem to have friends.
And I babysat for a boy from my church who was a year younger then I was. He was autistic. When we were growing up, the kids who were diagnosed with autism were not in the regular schools. They were in special schools or often institutionalized, so no they did not sit in class with us like they do today. The boy I babysat was a student at Hope Wall in Aurora.
There have been major advancements and changes in how these things have been diagnosed and identified. Yes there is an increase in diagnoses of these things, but there is a dispute in educational and medical circles as to whether the incidence has actually increased, or whether they are just better diagnosed.
Having two nephews with Aspergers, I do believe the ability to diagnose is part of the reason for the increase. I knew kids just like them growing up who never had the diagnosis. And in my nephews’ cases, my sister would not have bothered with the diagnosis had it not been for the education system that started to fail them when they reached high school. At that point, they could ace every test put in front of them, could tell you everything about what they had learned, but their grades did not reflect this knowledge due to silly things like whether their binder was organized correctly…