Question

what do you know about the emerging lifestyles in modern societies ?

Answer 1

Less physical activity In Scandinavia, as in most other industrialised countries, young people's everyday life is gradually mechanised and urbanised. More and more time is spent on indoor activities. As an example, 72 percent of all Norwegian teenage girls report that their favourite hobby is shopping. Young people's leisure time is spent in shopping malls, snack bars, in front of computergames, Internet chats, and television screens. An average young man that graduate from highschool in the USA has spent 12000 hours at school and 19000 hours in front of a television/video screen. The distance between our different arenas is increasingly spent on wheels, lifts, and escalators. Many traditional physical activities are replaced by technical inventions. The New Scientist recently commented on the modern life style and its effect on people's health. As an example, the journal refers to English researchers who have calculated that the average use of a mobile phone saves us from walking 16 kilometers every year. The normal situation of a Norwegian child at the end of the millennium is to enter kindergarten at the age of 3. The kindergarten offers little space for a variety of physical play. Much of the time is spent indoors on a flat floor, or on pillows, or on chairs. We have registered a setback in motor skills among pre-school children. In Scandinavia we also have a number of kindergartens where the kids spend all day out in the nature, in the woods, or at the seaside. These children have far better motor skills, they have better ability to concentrate, they observe visually better - which makes them safer along the roads, and generally they are in better health conditions. Even the teachers in these kindergartens are in better health than their colleagues in traditional kindergartens. Traditionally, Norwegian school children walk to school every day. Only primary school pupils living more than 4 kilometers away from school are entitled to bus transportation. Today the situation is different. In most schools, about 50 percent of the pupils are taken regularly to and from school by car, either by parents or by neighbours. The percentage is higher among 6 year-olds, and lower among older pupils. This happens in spite of a major effort in many local communities to build separate roads for pedestrians and bikers, safe from the increasing car traffic. Another aspect of this tendency is not to walk to school when the weather is cold, wet or windy. My own study indicates that students today are less tolerant to bad weather and have less ability to cope with physical strains than 10 to 15 years ago. Teachers taking students into woodlands and mountains complain about their lack of experience with outdoor life. They have far less knowledge about animals, plants, and nature in general than the students of the same age had a few years ago. Traditionally, children and young people in Norway spent a lot of time on physical play, sports, and games. Today about 80 percent of all 10 to 11 year-old children in Norway take part in organised sport activities. The time spent on traditional physical play seems to be declining. At the age of 13, about 60 percent of the boys and 50 percent of the girls take part in organized sport activities. The figures go dramatically down as they grow older. The number of young people that never or very seldom play sports is increasing dramatically from the age of 15 to the age of 24. A recently published Norwegian study shows that only 47 percent of all young people aged 20 to 24 year-olds are doing physical training of any kind every 14 days or more.
 
The human costs of not to intervene in these areas could be dramatic. The financial costs by having increasing numbers of dead and severely handicapped people because of an unwanted lifestyle will go beyond any imagination.