In recent years, overweightness among young children has reached epidemic proportions. While the contributory factors behind this increase are a sedentary lifestyle and a lack of fitness activity, I believe that addressing the issue requires both parental and governmental efforts.
There are two root causes of current childhood obesity, one of which is an unhealthy way of living. It should hardly come as a surprise that many children are tethered to their gadgets such as smartphones and computers to play video games and spend time on social media. This tendency to isolate themselves from the outside world is accompanied by the excessive consumption of junk food awash with oils, calories, sugar, and saturated fat. The continuous intake of processed food can eventually lead to obesity. Additionally, immobility of most young children is another reason why they are gaining extra weight. Due to growing academic expectations, children are increasingly allocating more time to their studies while overlooking the importance of physical exercise as they deem it to be time-consuming.
Turning to the viable measures, chief among them is to increase parental supervision of their children’s daily routine. The “carrot-and-stick” approach can yield desirable outcomes, by which caregivers should punish children for over-indulgence in fast food and virtual games and reward them for adhering to the rules. This policy can incentivize the younger generation to regulate their consumption of harmful products and their social media activity. Governments are another stakeholder to combat the widespread illness. They can create fitness facilities to encourage active lifestyles among young children and tax fast-food giants like KFC, McDonald’s, and Subway. As a result, affected youngsters can recover from their ailments, and their exposure to fast-food advertisements can decrease.
In conclusion, the adoption of passive lifestyles marked by the impact of technologies, processed food, and insufficient exercise is to blame for ever-rising levels of overweightness amongst children. Only by implementing parental control over.