Pat Hartman | Childhood Obesity News

Coronavirus Chronicles — Safety and Sports

Pat Hartman February 10, 2021 1 Comment

Every so often, a story is published that just sounds crazy. Somebody throws a birthday party for their cat, and subsequently, at least a dozen people test positive for COVID-19. In America, pretty close to half the K-12 students are in virtual-only schooling. Minnesota hospitals are taking in patients from four adjacent states. Every day brings some new wrinkle to which we must then adjust.

How about this one? In Los Angeles County, California, for the sake of air quality, normally only a certain number of cremations are allowed in any given time period. But the rule had to be abandoned. In hospitals, funeral homes and crematoria, the bodies of pandemic casualties tend to pile up. When the authorities run out of refrigerated trucks, those furnaces need to fire up.

A lot of belief systems still include the tenet that young people do not catch the virus. But 19-year-old Isaiah Mays (Evansville, ID) and 18-year-old community volunteer Wilber Portillo (Denver) died of COVID-19, to name just two recent casualties. Some young victims played sports, others did not.

In the drive to end childhood obesity, the pandemic is not helping one bit. For everyone’s sake, kids need to move around and burn off both physical and emotional energy. At the same time, virus-wise, most of the activities they do for exercise involve a hazardous amount of proximity to other people.

How to run school sports

If the reader can only spare two minutes, a video about best practices can fill in a lot of blanks.

The Centers for Disease Control kicked off February with the publication of voluminous information and advice for the administrators of youth sports. We summarize here a small sample of points not already mentioned. For example, coaches might need to make philosophical adaptations, and have the players work on individual skills, more than teamwork, for the time being. To directly quote from the massive and impressive paper,

Coaches may also put players into small groups (cohorts) that remain together and work through stations, rather than switching groups or mixing groups. Minimize equipment sharing, and clean and disinfect shared equipment between use by different people to reduce the risk of COVID-19 spread.

The CDC suggests that parents “or other household members” are obligated to hang around and make sure their kids observe distancing and keep their masks on; thus bringing more people into the contagion/exposure pools. At the same time, schools should “limit any nonessential visitors, spectators, volunteers, and activities involving external groups or organizations.” It is possible that determining who gets in and who does not, who may attend, and who must attend, could involve strenuous discussion and possibly even litigation.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Considerations for Youth Sports Administrators,” CDC.gov, 12/31/2020
Image by Jernej Furman/CC BY 2.0

Kids and Sports and COVID-19

Pat Hartman February 9, 2021 No Comments

The American Academy of Pediatrics published guidelines for keeping kids safe if they engage in sports, these days. It is mostly common sense that shouldn’t even need to be verbalized. Of course, wrestling is risky. The combatants exchange bodily fluids and exhale in one another’s faces. And sports with shared equipment, from dodgeball to basketball, are risky too.

Any indoor sport is risky, especially if it involves copious heavy breathing on the part of the athletes and/or a lot of cheering and yelling from the audience. If the ventilation is inadequate, the danger goes exponential. And the bringing together of teams from different geographical areas to mingle and exchange cooties, and then return to their homes, is a virus’s dream scenario.

Sports like bike riding and golf, where distance is maintained, are obviously much safer. Likewise, sports where equipment is not shared. When the threat is an airborne illness, the outdoors is manifestly the preferred venue.

Needful propaganda

What if children are impatient with or scornful of the rules? What do we tell them? People should stay six feet apart because experts with fancy equipment and specialized computer programs have figured out that it is safer than being closer.

And what about masks? They protect the child, yes, but mainly a mask protects other people. Of course, your child is too kind and considerate to ever want to make someone else sick. That goes without saying. But they need to understand that a person can carry around the virus, and give it to other people, without ever feeling sick — without ever even knowing that tiny hitchhikers were flying out of their nose and mouth, trying to reach other people and bring them down.

Sample sales pitch: “If you are sick and don’t know it, you could accidentally hurt somebody a lot. But if you wear a mask, you could save somebody’s life and be a hero.”

If the child’s sport requires gear around the face and/or head, incorporating a mask might be an extra challenge. They might need help to make everything work together.

Sample question: “Out here on the bike trail, I’m not going to talk to any strangers. Why do I have to wear a mask along with my helmet?”

Sample answer: “Because if, heaven forbid, something goes wrong and you’re on the ground injured, and a passerby or a medic comes to help, they’re breathing all over you, and if they have the virus, you could catch it. So, mask up please.”

Cases vary, and hopefully, everybody will do the best they can under the circumstances. For basic guidance, here is the official word from the World Health Organization:

While the WHO does not recommend wearing face masks during vigorous exercise, it should be worn when non-vigorous exercise is being performed and physical distancing is not possible.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “How can you help keep your kids safe while they play sports?,” SBM.org, undated
Image by Phil Roeder/CC BY 2.0

Coronavirus Chronicles — Kids and Air

Pat Hartman February 8, 2021 No Comments

Over the months, science has discovered that humans who contract the virus but remain asymptomatic throughout the course of their illness, are about 80% less infectious than the people who develop symptoms. The very dangerous individual is one who is infected and has not yet developed symptoms, but soon will. These stealth carriers are about 40% more infectious than the people with symptoms, and may associate with the public for days or weeks, spreading contagion, before any sign of ill health manifests itself.

The phenomenon known as the “secondary attack rate” refers to “the likelihood that a person with COVID-19 will infect another member of their household.” That ratio is around 15%. Children, if they do get it, are just as likely as adults to become symptomatic, but (as far as science is aware right now) the effects are less severe. In a multi-generational household, older adults are more likely to catch it than younger ones, which kind of implies that the younger ones are doing the infecting.

How does this happen? Check out a creepy video demonstration of how disease spreads. The experience can encourage taking every possible precaution to fight off the virus.

It’s in the air

We talked about humidity, and specifically, humidifying devices in the home, which have earned mixed reviews. Okay then, what about an air purification device? (The illustration on this page, by the way, is not any identifiable brand of serious air purifier, but a dust removal system in a wood-working shop.)

For a small study, a research team brought portable air purifiers into a German high school and evaluated their efficiency. Journalist Chris Baraniuk writes,

Class carried on as normal while the purifiers quietly hummed away and detectors monitored aerosol levels. The findings have been published as a preprint and are not yet peer-reviewed, but they back up the fact that HEPA filters decrease aerosols of a wide range of sizes in a relatively busy indoor space.

And yes, the students and their teacher kept their masks on the whole time. Because that’s what you do when a deadly pandemic is afoot. Experts want us to understand that this is a multifactorial struggle. We need slings, shields, and tanks. Mechanically cleaning the air in a delineated indoor space is fine, but it is not “the” answer. According to the Environmental Protection Agency,

By itself, air cleaning or filtration is not enough to protect people from exposure to the virus that causes Covid-19.

Any measure we are equipped to take should be conceptualized not as the metaphorical magic silver bullet, but as one tool among many “potential components in your wider arsenal of defenses,” as Baraniuk phrases it. According to the comparison used by some, it is great to have an airbag in your car, but fasten that belt too, and stay out of the driver’s seat when chemically impaired. Do all the things.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Kids Highly Likely to Transmit Coronavirus to Others: Study,” HealthDay.com, 01/21/21
Source: “Should You Buy an Air Purifier for Covid-19?,” Medium.com, 12/02/20
Image by Tampere Hacklab/CC BY 2.0

Coronavirus Chronicles — Destabilizing the Foe

Pat Hartman February 5, 2021 1 Comment

A capsid is the outer shell of a virus, which needs to be tough enough to hold and protect its contents in a passive mode, yet fragile enough to, at the right moment, enable the contents to rush out and fertilize the territory it has occupied. As a report on the subject explained,

[The] capsid also needs to become unstable to release the virulence factors into the host cell. Thus, the stability of the capsid and the transitions between stable and unstable structures are key issues in the life cycle of a virus.

What humans hope to do, of course, is end the virus’ lifecycle, with the purpose of ending the pandemic, and consequently preventing quite a lot of obesity. This is why researchers have shown interest in the weather, and in climate manipulation (on a micro-scale, like inside a room or a building). A recent post mentioned a few studies about humidity in this setting.

A very useful piece by Robert Roy Britt quotes experts like Lloyd Hough, Ph.D. While we may not have been aware that the Department of Homeland Security encompasses such an institution as the Hazard Awareness and Characterization Technology Center, it indeed does, and Hough is the head of it. With lower ambient temperature and humidity, he says, you get a stable virus. (This is why we see advisory labels on food packaging that say “Store in a cool dry place.” The environment encourages the containment of harmful critters.) When temperature and humidity rise, so does the threat posed by the destabilized virus.

Ajit Ahlawat, of Germany’s Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research, says,

If the relative humidity of indoor air is below 40%, the particles emitted by infected people absorb less water, remain lighter, fly further through the room, and are more likely to be inhaled by healthy people.

But the air is not the only factor. What about those healthy people on the receiving end of toxic aerosol? Their interior architecture certainly plays a role, Journalist Britt says,

Humidity not only affects the virus itself, but also the front lines of our immune system. From the nose on down, the human respiratory tract filters out particles that would do us harm. That filtering system and other aspects of our immune system don’t work as well in dry air, somewhat like how a dry sponge doesn’t clean as well as a wet one.

If someone wants to use a humidifier in the home, Britt offers caveats. The machines have to be cleaned quite conscientiously, and the filters need to be changed. Otherwise, it can create more problems. Some experts even go so far as to state that they do not recommend the use of a humidifier, period. Before proceeding, the author recommends consulting the relevant Mayo Clinic guidance.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Stability and Dynamics of Virus Capsids Described by Coarse-Grained Modeling,” ScienceDirect.com, December 2006
Source: “Why Some Experts Say Humidifiers Could Help Against Covid-19,” Medium.com, 11/08/20
Image by Mike Finn/CC BY 2.0

Coronavirus Chronicles — One Writer Tackles Explanation

Pat Hartman February 4, 2021 No Comments

The pandemic war is fought on many fronts. Currently, schooling is hotly debated. Kids need their education, parents need their lives back, and teachers feel an urgent necessity to not die from something they caught at work. Meanwhile, they can’t even get on the vaccination list. Of course, situations are not parallel everywhere. Different states handle things in their own ways, as in Florida and Louisiana, where high school wrestling programs have produced superspreader events.

Meanwhile, researchers everywhere wrestle with the questions of who is most at risk, and who needs the most protection, and most of all, what keeps one individual from becoming infected while others succumb? Should we be looking at age or race, or weather, or nutritional supplements like Vitamin D and zinc, or what?

In late September, journalist Zeynep Tufeckci, who teaches at the University of North Carolina, wrote out some basic principles that are detailed but not hard to grasp for The Atlantic. The title of the piece, “This Overlooked Variable Is the Key to the Pandemic,” refers to a way of understanding that would help to answer questions, including the foundations of current controversies, and rein in the spread of COVID-19 and its brethren.

Tufeckci speaks of the tendency of any disease to fall into one of two categories, deterministic or stochastic. Roughly, this translates to linear or random. Tufeckci wrote,

In deterministic trajectories, we expect what happened yesterday to give us a good sense of what to expect tomorrow. Stochastic phenomena, however, don’t operate like that — the same inputs don’t always produce the same outputs, and things can tip over quickly from one state to the other.

He recalls that the dreaded superspreader events all have in common: a bunch of people, indoors, with poor ventilation, unmasked. (In many cases, another shared affinity is that the people talk loudly and/or sing.) For such an occurrence, a number of things need to happen at the same time. Because if, for instance, the world’s most contagious patient were alone on an ice floe, there would be no superspreader event. That patient’s presence is a “necessary condition,” because, without that viral load, nothing would happen.

But that person’s presence alone is not a “sufficient condition” because without some other people there as targets, no spread can take place. They too are a necessary condition, and the more necessary conditions that come together in one environment, the more likely it is that something bad will happen. Also, aside from those items and several others the author mentions, he says,

We don’t even know if there are more factors yet to be discovered that influence super-spreading.

But we do know enough to avoid assembling as unmasked, poorly ventilated indoor crowds!

This virus is what scientists call an overdispersed pathogen, “meaning that it tends to spread in clusters.” According to recent studies, most infected people probably don’t infect anyone else. Those who do are real overachievers, like a woman in Daegu, South Korea, who unknowingly passed the disease along to over 5,000 fellow church members. Tufeckci wrote,

A recent paper found that in Hong Kong, which had extensive testing and contact tracing, about 19 percent of cases were responsible for 80 percent of transmission… Multiple studies from the beginning have suggested that as few as 10 to 20 percent of infected people may be responsible for as much as 80 to 90 percent of transmission…

But what we have not figured out is, “Why Daegu in February and not Seoul, despite the two cities being in the same country, under the same government, people, weather, and more?”

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “This Overlooked Variable Is the Key to the Pandemic,” TheAtlantic.com, 09/30/20
Image by Mark Lundy/CC BY-ND 2.0

Coronavirus Chronicles — Mouthwash and Baby Shampoo?

Pat Hartman February 3, 2021 No Comments

Obese or not, no child should get COVID-19. Of course, conscientious parents take every precaution they can think of. In September, the Journal of Medical Virology published a peer-reviewed study seeming to indicate that some familiar consumer products could help with protection. What motivated the researchers?

Doctors have long been known to treat chronic rhinosinusitis with nasal washes of extremely diluted baby shampoo, and the reasons why that is effective are interesting. Naturally, the researchers wondered whether it could help shield a person from acquiring the virus.

To experiment with our current enemy itself requires the highest level of certification and regulation. But they wanted to get at least a general idea, so they worked with something close, or as Katherine J. Wu of The New York Times phrases it, they…

[…] looked at the effects of mouthwash and nasal rinses on a coronavirus called 229E that causes common colds — not the new coronavirus, which goes by the formal name of SARS-CoV-2, and causes far more serious disease.

The journalist spoke with virologist Dr. Angela Rasmussen of Georgetown University, who allowed that while 229E can serve as “a good proxy for the new coronavirus in certain experiments,” the two are not the same. And the testing environment — a dish in a lab — is not the same as the inside of a human mouth.

Many of us grew up with the folklore that the mouth is the dirtiest part of the body, and according to a quick online search, today’s science seems to have reached the same conclusion. One of the reasons for this is the interior architecture of the mouth, with all kinds of places for microscopic critters to hide.

Promising, perhaps

The bottom line is, to be truly meaningful, clinical trials would have to employ bona fide SARS-CoV-2. It would take a boatload of unequivocally positive results to get everyone on board with mouthwash and baby shampoo. To pursue these leads would be a long and expensive quest. The study authors wrote:

While clinical trials will be necessary to confirm the virucidal potential of these products and assess their ability to limit transmission of HCoV within the general population, in the current manuscript we have demonstrated here that several commonly available healthcare products have significant virucidal properties with respect to HCoV.

While acknowledging the difficulties, they also believe that because the products “directly treat the major sites of reception and transmission,” they could “serve as a complement to other healthcare and public antiviral precautions.”

Scientists will not always step up and say that such-and-such theory is nonsense. Sometimes they gently suggest that results found by other scientists may have been “over-interpreted” which can mean, “We will give you the benefit of the doubt for the present, but you need to show us convincing evidence, sooner rather than later.” The viewpoint of Elizabeth Wu is stricter:

Relying on mouthwash or a nasal rinse to rid the body of infectious virus would be about as futile as trimming the top of a cluster of weeds, paying the roots little mind, and expecting the garden pests to disappear.

But doesn’t viral infection go by load? Isn’t it possible that one of these measures could reduce the viral load by the crucial amount — just enough to make the difference between getting sick or not?

Bruce Y. Lee of Forbes.com proposes a commonsense compromise:

One way mouthwash, baby shampoo, and nasal rinse solutions could be helpful against coronaviruses and maybe the Covid-19 coronavirus is to clean things when using a disinfectant or another cleaning methods is not safe or practical. Examples include your toothbrush, a mouth guard, a set of vampire teeth, or anything that you may put into your mouth, nose, or other opening in your body.

While someone might not rush out to buy the recommended products, there could be a bottle or two of them around the place already, so why not use them to wipe down countertops, door handles, faucets, household phones, the grab-bars of walkers, children’s toys, and other vulnerable surfaces? It certainly couldn’t hurt.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Lowering the transmission and spread of human coronavirus,” Wiley.com, 09/17/20
Source: “No, Mouthwash Will Not Save You From the Coronavirus,” NYTimes.com, 10/21/20
Source: “Can Mouthwash Protect You Against Covid-19 Coronavirus? What This Study Really Said,” Forbes.com, 10/22/20
Image by Judith Doyle/CC BY-ND 2.0

Coronavirus Chronicles — Kids, Weather, and COVID-19

Pat Hartman February 2, 2021 No Comments

Obese or otherwise, we want to keep children from contracting COVID-19, and if they do catch it, we want them healed quickly and thoroughly. This blog has mentioned the legal and logistical factors that come into play when testing and contact tracing, amongst minors, are at issue. Because of the disease’s long incubation period and additional logistical delaying factors, any statistics we see are only a picture of how conditions were a few weeks ago, not now.

Our knowledge of the first version of SARS-CoV-2 is far from complete, and it keeps changing as if it wants to make sure we never catch up. And of course over in Nature’s camp, other factors are also at work. At one point in 2020, claims were made that the arrival of hot weather would cause the virus to dry up and blow away, which was neither literally nor figuratively true.

Figuring it out

In March, a small Chinese study concluded that the virus “showed no signs of weakening in warm and humid conditions.” In June, at the University of Sydney, researchers “discovered a 1 percent decrease in humidity could increase the number of COVID-19 cases by 6 percent.” Epidemiologist Professor Michael Ward explained it to the press like this:

When it comes to climate, we found that lower humidity is the main driver here [Australia], rather than colder temperatures… It means we may see an increased risk in winter here, when we have a drop in humidity. But in the northern hemisphere, in areas with lower humidity or during periods when humidity drops, there might be a risk even during the summer months.

What are the biological implications regarding the airborne virus, which is a living organism? In humid air, apparently, aerosols are bigger and heavier (and sometimes called droplets), so they fall to the ground or other surfaces more quickly, rather than floating around. Dr. Ward says,

When the humidity is lower, the air is drier and it makes the aerosols smaller. When you sneeze and cough those smaller infectious aerosols can stay suspended in the air for longer. That increases the exposure for other people.

Results were published of a multi-author study of conditions in 50 cities, of which eight were heavily affected by COVID-19:

The 8 cities with substantial community spread as of March 10, 2020, were located on a narrow band, roughly on the 30° N to 50° N corridor. They had consistently similar weather patterns, consisting of mean temperatures of between 5 and 11 °C [41º – 51.8º Fahrenheit], combined with low specific humidity (3-6 g/kg) and low absolute humidity (4-7 g/m3).

In the same month, Chelsea Harvey summed it up for Scientific American:

Several laboratory experiments have suggested higher temperatures and humidity are associated with reduced survival of the virus. That said, the report noted, conditions simulated in the lab don’t always mimic conditions the virus will encounter in real life.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Coronavirus shown to spread in high heat and humidity,” News-Medical.net, 03/30/20
Source: “Reduced humidity linked to increased COVID-19 risk,” MedicalXpress.com, 06/01/20
Source: “Temperature, Humidity, and Latitude Analysis to Estimate Potential Spread and Seasonality of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19),” JAMANetwork.com, 06/11/20
Source: “Summer Weather Won’t Save Us from Coronavirus,” ScientificAmerican.com, 06/19/20
Image by Jernej Furman/CC BY 2.0

Coronavirus Chronicles — More about Kids and Transmission

Pat Hartman February 1, 2021 1 Comment

To continue the discussion of where children spend their non-home hours, we consult a Frequently Asked Questions page issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Packed with information, it concerns childcare programs and schools, and was updated just days ago.

Parents want to know when it is appropriate to seek out COVID-19 testing for their children. The answer is,

Schools should determine, in collaboration with state, tribal, local, and territorial health officials, whether to implement any testing strategy, and if so, how to best do so. In the case of K-12 schools operated by the federal government (e.g., K-12 schools for Department of Defense dependents), schools should also collaborate with the host nation, local military installation, and federal public health officials.

So, more than a dozen institutions are eligible to potentially be involved in the decision about any one child being tested for the virus or not. The offered guidance is exemplary for a country invested in freedom, but not very hopeful in a practical sense. For the guidelines that school nurses and community healthcare providers are asked to follow, see “Information for Pediatric Healthcare Providers” and “Strategies for Protecting K-12 School Staff from COVID-19.”

For those holdouts who still opine otherwise, the CDC declares adamantly that children can catch COVID-19, which can make them sick, and sometimes (not often) can make them very sick indeed. And even if they show no signs of sickness, they can still carry the virus around and share it with others. The advisory notes, of course, that children with underlying medical conditions (like obesity and its many co-morbidities) are at particular risk.

How should schools handle case investigation and contact tracing?

As was previously mentioned, some experts believe that when the disease affects more than 10 cases per 100,000 people, any attempt at the endeavor known as “contact tracing” is doomed to futility. There are issues of geography, person-power, financing, political clout, and so on, as well as the various legal angles.

Americans, depending on who and where they are, have many rights. While “some jurisdictions allow for individuals as young as 12 to answer medical and public health-related questions,” the attempt to collect information can be a minefield. Here is the CDC’s caveat:

K-12 schools should consult with public health officials and legal counsel to determine how best to conduct case investigations and contact tracing… According to state, tribal, local, and territorial legal parameters, some K-12 schools and health departments may need to obtain consent from parents, caregivers, or guardians for activities conducted with some or all minors, and students with disabilities.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “K-12 Schools and Child Care Programs,” CDC.gov, 01/25/21
Image by Quinn Dombrowski

Coronavirus Chronicles — Children and COVID-19 Transmission

Pat Hartman January 29, 2021 1 Comment

Remember the innocent days when it appeared that children did not catch or transmit the new coronavirus? With a sigh, just let those memories go. As it turns out, the young’uns can be wicked infectious. According to a study published in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases, children are much more likely than, for instance, adults over 60, to infect additional family members.

Also, babies less than a year old are more likely to catch it than are kids between two and five years of age. The report says, “This may be due to a combination of their still-developing immune systems and their close contact with adults.”

The American Association of Pediatrics says,

[…] because viral loads may be similar in symptomatic and asymptomatic carriers of COVID-19, including children, there may be a high risk for transmission to other children and adults through asymptomatic children in settings serving large numbers of children, such as child care and schools.

The AAP also says, in a report published this month, that COVID-19 outcomes in American childcare providers whose establishments stayed open during the first three months of pandemic awareness were compared with the fates of childcare providers who closed their facilities. Surprisingly, in the light of present knowledge, it appears that continuing to provide care during that first quarter “was not associated with an elevated risk for COVID-19 transmission to providers.”

Of course, that study only looked at childcare providers, not kids, but by the summer of 2020, the virus flourished in daycare facilities in Texas and other places, so somebody was obviously passing it along to somebody.

In October, The New York Times reported,

As the coronavirus soars across the country, charting a single-day record of 99,155 new cases on Friday and surpassing nine million cases nationwide, tracing the path of the pandemic in the United States is no longer simply challenging. It has become nearly impossible.

“It’s just kind of everywhere,” said Crystal Watson, a senior scholar at the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who estimated that tracing coronavirus cases becomes difficult once the virus spreads to more than 10 cases per 100,000 people.

It is important to remember that universal testing is not the norm. Many children do not get visibly sick from the virus. They remain asymptomatic. With testing limited and unreliable, millions of children who don’t appear sick have not been tested, and many who are sick have not been tested. There is no way of knowing how many people, children and adults, have spread COVID-19 without ever being aware that they had it. But asymptomatic victims are still able to transmit the virus, and that is a fact it does not pay to forget.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Kids Highly Likely to Transmit Coronavirus to Others: Study,” HealthDay.com, 01/21/21
Source: “COVID-19 Transmission in US Child Care Programs,” AAAPPublications.org, January 2021
Source: “How Are Americans Catching the Virus? Increasingly, ‘They Have No Idea’,” NYTimes.com, 10/31/20
Image by Ivan Radic/CC BY 2.0

Coronavirus Chronicles — Coping Skills Can Save the Day

Pat Hartman January 28, 2021 No Comments

In an uncomfortable situation, there is a human tendency to reduce stress by goofing around. Some confront COVID-19 by wearing expressively decorated masks, while others draw Norman Rockwell-esque cartoons featuring rather dark humor.

Kids stuck at home need something to do, and a parent who is grasping at the last straws of sanity might find inspiration anywhere. How about a variation on old-fashioned paper dolls? If there is a stash of slick magazines on a shelf, the pages might include almost life-size faces that can be cut out and used as bases for creative mask designs. Or if the household has abundant technology, a life-size color portrait of each family member’s face could be printed and pasted to cardboard, as a basis for many mask designs. Or maybe children who have never drawn cartoons or comic strips before could be induced to try that art form.

Journalist Ryan Prior asked around, and got some ideas from a YMCA camp director named Nikki Murray, who suggests a very simple home scavenger hunt; and who also suggests that getting kids into flexibility and core strength can be facilitated by something called Cosmic Kids Yoga.

See the opportunity, not the problem

Prior also interviewed Myles Faith, Ph.D., who suggests using this weird era of history to learn more about domestic life and understand that an isolated nuclear family does not have to explode. The enforced concentration on home life can, if handled properly, bring about interesting results. “Parents and families can learn a lot about their strength and their resilience,” Faith says.

Professor Faith also contributed suggestions to another publication, and those suggestions include “Keep it positive.” One of the secrets is to zero in on particular problems by “reorienting caregivers to successes, and setting specific goals for success.” But not big goals, which can be daunting. The secret is to set a small challenge and beat it, then designate another challenge and overcome that, creating a series of victories that will each help visualize and realize the next step. Journalist Marie Morelli summarizes,

Making small changes and focusing on specific, measurable and reasonable goals will lead to better results than simply nagging your child to eat better… Some goals families could set include eating a certain number of fruits and vegetable servings per day; cutting back on sugary drinks by a specific amount; or reducing screen time by a certain number of hours.

A family project could be a collection of individual diaries, or even a communal spreadsheet of what everybody eats every day. Sometimes people are not aware, until they see it on paper, of exactly how much they consume in a 24-hour period. The raising of consciousness should be a helpful tool, not an excuse to give anybody a hard time.

In the interests of peace, harmony, and reasonable leadership, parents (and those who act in place of parents) sometimes have to rearrange the furniture in their heads, too. Prof. Faith asks parents to select one change they themselves would be willing to make, so he can guide them in using that as a starting point. He says,

Maybe before some families jump into the question of obesity prevention, as a family, [they should ask] what are we going to do to help stay relaxed? Maybe our goal for this week is to play four board games together, or our goal is to spend 15 minutes just doing a family meeting or check-in… Maybe that’s where some families need to start.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Sedentary lockdowns put kids at risk for obesity. Here’s how to help them stay moving,” CNN.com. 06/12/20
Source: “Obesity expert: Make small changes to ward off quarantine weight gain,” Syracuse.com, 10/27/20
Images by Tony Alter and The COVID Chronicles/CC BY 2.0

Coronavirus Chronicles — Safety and Sports

How to run school sports

Kids and Sports and COVID-19

Needful propaganda

Coronavirus Chronicles — Kids and Air

It’s in the air

Coronavirus Chronicles — Destabilizing the Foe

Coronavirus Chronicles — One Writer Tackles Explanation

Coronavirus Chronicles — Mouthwash and Baby Shampoo?

Promising, perhaps

Coronavirus Chronicles — Kids, Weather, and COVID-19

Figuring it out

Coronavirus Chronicles — More about Kids and Transmission

How should schools handle case investigation and contact tracing?

Coronavirus Chronicles — Children and COVID-19 Transmission

Coronavirus Chronicles — Coping Skills Can Save the Day

See the opportunity, not the problem

Profiles: Kids Struggling with Weight

The Book

About Dr. Robert A. Pretlow

Presentations

Food & Health Resources