I've got a kid playing baseball in a 7-8 year old league. You look around the league and see all these morbidly obese kids walking around and I just shake my head. WTF is wrong with parents allowing their kids.....?
Well, it actually all goes back to some of the things in Kevin's article. Again, being in my 40's, I grew up before any real technological shit came to be. Hell, we only had 3 channels. Atari Pong was da' bomb. Bottom line, when you got home from school, the LAST place you wanted to be was in the house. Nothing to do. You hit the neighborhood, hooked up with your friends and smoked a ton of weed....no wait, that was college.
We spent every possible minute playing football, basketball, whiffleball, whatever....until mom threatened us within an inch of our lives to get in the house. We threw water balloons at cars, made bikes and jumped over shit, rode our bikes all over town. Unless it was Bugs Bunny or Saturday morning cartoons, TV just wasn't on the agenda.
Thank goodness my kid has no chance of being fat but I've got to admit, he'd much prefer to veg out with a Playstation or sit on the computer rather than hit the ball field. And unfortunately, he's never played a pick up game of anything in the neighborhood...and probably won't.