Rediscovering Playtime

It's 10:30 on a Saturday morning, and like a typical New Yorker, Biz Johnson-Brown, 31/2, is running late. Class has already been in session for half an hour when she parks her purple Princess bike near the door and, accompanied by her father, Bruce Brown, joins half a dozen other children as they climb and crawl and tiptoe their way through a miniature obstacle course under the relentlessly cheerful supervision of their beloved drill sergeant, Miss Leah.

This is the big-city version of Gymboree, the international kiddie-fitness franchise, and if you didn't know you were in the windowless basement of an apartment tower on the Upper East Side, the mango-sherbet walls, brightly colored play equipment and fuzzy purple apes and orange- pink-and-green spiders suspended from the ceiling could just as easily be in any small town or suburban strip mall.

And like their country cousins in hundreds of similar toddler play programs across the U.S., these kids simply love the chance to burn off energy and master their muscular and coordination skills. It's no surprise either. Running, jumping, climbing and spinning around in circles have always been an indispensible part of childhood. And until the past few decades, they were an integral part of U.S. children's lives--playing out on the street or in the park or backyard after school and on weekends, organizing pick-up games of soccer, tag or baseball, racing around the neighborhood or going off to camp all summer long, and, just for good measure, burning calories in gym classes from September through June.

Yet those nostalgic images of an active childhood that most adults carry in their memories have all but disappeared in much of the nation. City streets and parks are often too dangerous for kids to play in. Suburban streets teem with traffic. TV, video games and the Internet seduce children into staying indoors and sitting inert. Even in quiet towns, walking or biking to school is increasingly rare.

At the same time, budget problems have forced school boards across the U.S. to cut back on "unnecessary" programs like art, music and physical education, while pressure from parents to raise academic standards has in many places squeezed even recess from the curriculum. Only 56% of U.S. high school students were enrolled in a phys-ed class as of the most recent survey, in 2003, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and only 28% have gym every day, down from 42% in 1991. And that's overall; the percentages among African-American and Hispanic kids are even lower.

Add the lure of fatty, sugary fast food--available even in school cafeterias these days--and you've got a generation that's less fit and more prone to obesity than any in history. In the late 1970s, about 7% of U.S. kids were classified as obese; by 2000 that percentage had doubled.

Fitness itself is difficult to measure directly in kids, according to Dr. William Dietz, director of the nutrition and physical-activity division at the CDC. To do it right, you should put them on a treadmill with a mouthpiece in place and their noses plugged up, and work them to exhaustion while measuring oxygen consumption. "It's hard to get anyone under 10 to do that," he says.