Ban ban ban
July 29th, 2006 at 10:04 am by David FarrarFew things anny me more than the banning brigade. They want to remove choice from people. Look at this list of ideas from Auckland Public Health Service:
- ban parents from dropping kids off at school
- ban dairies near schools
- ban fast food outlets near schools
I propose we ban people who want to ban things!!
No tag for this post.
July 29th, 2006 at 11:44 am
I sort of agree with not having parents ferrying their offspring to school (usually in huge 4WDs as well) and clogging up the roads as well as further limiting what little exercise children get.
It could be introduced without banning, but I suppose reasoning has gone out of fashion, so…
Vote:July 29th, 2006 at 11:57 am
A pedal generator could be fitted under each desk, so the kiddies can make electricity while studying.
Cuts the school power bill and exercises them at the same time!
Vote:July 29th, 2006 at 11:59 am
My office overlooks a primary school playground. From here I can see far too many flabby unathletic kids who cannot run, skip, or even walk up a hill without puffing. And too many of them will hit our health system with diabetes in the next few decades. And no doubt then the righties of the day will still be bleating ineffectually on about high taxes and/or long waiting lists.
It is the same problem we had with smoking. In the end we got around to banning that too.
Vote:July 29th, 2006 at 12:27 pm
A pedal generator could be fitted under each desk, so the kiddies can make electricity while studying.
My 12 yr old was doing a science project and we looked at making a fridge that ran on electricity generated by a exercycle only, requiring that a certain amount of exercise would be needed to keep the cream buns fresh. Given the current state of energy availability this is no doubt an idea being tested by fridge boffins in secret laboratories all round the country, however it was too technical for us, so we did something else instead.
I do think that the measure for overweight and obese are too objective. I mean, the NZ athlete who competed in Dancing with the Stars (can’t recall her name Faiumu or something) is definitely overweight, but she is an achiever and does she have any health problems? A different BMI is required for different activities.
Banning parking near schools because of obesity is a bad idea. Banning because of overcrowding is more reasonable and is what our local primary is doing. I think that such bans should come from primary school level and not govt.
Vote:July 29th, 2006 at 12:41 pm
How many kids do you have logix?
How far do they walk to school?
How many sexual predators or who cruise past them looking for fresh meat on the way there?
Well you can’t answer number three becaue the sex offenders have rights even though sex crimes are the real hockey stick stat.
Frankly I have trouble with the idea that parents are happy to even let their kids out of their sight to go to school these days.
Vote:July 29th, 2006 at 3:55 pm
Let me tell you about my day. I have three young daughters. Each school morning, we get up, get all three of them shepherded through breakfast, getting dressed, hair done, teeth brushed, getting their school bags packed. It’s like herding cats. (Before you start thinking that’s because they are apallingly badly behaved kids – they aren’t. They regularly get compliments on their pleasant behaviour when we visit cafes, go to the supermarket, and from their teachers. But they are kids, and they have kids’ priorities, not adult priorities.) If we are lucky, we get to grab something to eat in between managing the morning rush, and making their school lunches, and getting ourselves washed and dressed so that we can go to work. A lot of this would be easier if I did it all for them…. but that would be pretty poor parenting, wouldn’t it? They do need to learn how to do things for themselves.
Have you ever tried to walk small children to school? Roughly, if you can walk somewhere by yourself in 5 minutes, it will take between 8 and 10 minutes if you have children with you. So now, some nutters want to make our mornings even more stressful by making us take an extra 10 or 15 minutes to walk the children (from wherever we are allowed to park!) to school, and then back to the car so that we can go to work.
All this is going to do is stress out working parents even more, and push the congestion out to a circle around the school.
And you know what? My kids are slender! We don’t even need to do this to avoid obesity. So in order to get the fatties into line, they are going to penalise me and my skinny children. Good one!
I suppose we could all get up 15 minutes earlier…. but as busy working parents, we need our sleep. And so do our kids. (And yes, they do go to bed early, around 7.30pm.)
I’m ranting – I know…. I’m not sorry about it.
Vote:July 29th, 2006 at 4:00 pm
Murray,
A fine upstanding member of the Paranoid Public aren’t we? There are no more “sexual predators” out there than there ever was. Both my daughters (who are now in their early 20′s) walked some distance to school for years. The simple precaution the school took was to ensure they had arranged several “safe homes” they could ask for help at, and when they were older cell-phones became available.
Only once in all that time did either of them have the slightest issue, and that was some dickhead being socially inept rather than dangerous. The actual numbers of children who are harmed on the way to or from school is exceedingly low, and always has been.
Like most people Murray, your perception of risk is distorted by a media that sells it’s product using distortion and sensation as the basic tools.
Vote:July 29th, 2006 at 5:04 pm
Fascinating, there is no risk yet you felt the need to take precuations? Safe houses and cell phones hardly sounds like Maybrey does it.
Screamingly funny that anyone who as ever read anything written by me would asume I even read newspapers other than find out what they are distorting this week.
My opinions are based on statisical analysis of our crime rates and the strong shift towards violent crimes, sexual crimes and abductions.
You can also add in the statistical spike in drugging with the intention of rape but that would hopefully fall outside the range of school children during school hours. Not always but hopefully not too common.
Are you going to claim that there is no such raise in these offences because the data is available to anyone.
Are you also claiming that parents are not concerned for the safety of their children? Fear that is either real or imagined is identical.
Regardless of this family life has changed. Under the bevnovlent rule jolly president clark there are very few families who can get by on a single income and the further incursion into peoples daily lives is as DFR jsut described for you.
Let me paint you another picture. I live in a block of flats. Recently one tennant was removed because he was running a tinny house. Before and after school he had regular visitors in the shape of two teenaged school girls. They looked perfectly respectible to me but I’m resonably sure their parents sure as hell didn’t know what they were doing and would not have been thrilled about it.
Is it or is it not both a parents right and responsibility to raise their children in the way they seem appropriate? Where does adding another regulating factor on them fit into that principle?
It suited you to send your kids off on foot, all good and well for you. My mother thought cycling 15 k’s on a busy highway was just the ticket for me. However what suited you and her might not suit someone else. You took precautions because you considered that there was some risk invloved in them walking. If you didn’t consider the posbility you wouldn;t have done it. My mother gave me a bright yellow jacket. Clearly she was aware that cycling was risky. In fact a dog tags would have been more useful.
The fact is no one told you that you had to do it in a particular way and you got to choose. Why should other people be stripped of the same right because it doesn’t happen to be yours?
The options for families with two working parents can be limited. School buses do not always suit their time requirements. Leaving kids at home alone before school does not appeal to a lot of people. If you life in Waniuiomata and the school is Chilton St James and you drive right past it why is it wrong to drop you kids there?
I speak as someone who has had to dogge all those expensive 4×4′s whilst trying to herd a 44 seater into what is suposedly an empty bustop.
Guess what at that time of day there is always a lot of traffic. Thats one of the reasons there’s a really slow speed limit around school buses and in my opinion there should be speed restrictions in the school area at those times anyway.
The best solution is to have a large pull in area where parents can drive in drop their kids then drive out again. Worked well at my old school.
Vote:July 29th, 2006 at 5:55 pm
Teresa Cormack,aged 5 or 6 disappeared 19/6 1987;found dead.That did it for me and most other Kiwi parents.Just one case you ask? It was enough to hugely change the way we saw things…logically or illogically.Media beat-up or not.Actually,how do you beat-up the hideous reality of what happened to this child?Mostly I’m a fairly logical person and when my girl was little I weighed up the chances of her being abducted etc (for a nano-second)and went with the “gut”.Being a parent sometimes has that effect. To my great joy she is now 14,beautiful,”hates” me and will one day discover why her mum sometimes put love before logic.
Vote:July 29th, 2006 at 7:00 pm
I feel sorry for many of you who live in citys I wish kids in New Zealand could live a more simple life, they seem to grow up a lot quicker in town but the kids seem to miss out on been kids. As for banning everything it’s a bit like handing out welfare with no strings attached, it has come back and is bitting us on the arse. As for for fat kids send them here-no fat kids on this farm and no they are not slaves.
Vote:July 29th, 2006 at 8:08 pm
The drivers for the “ban” are probably more road congestion than obesity. Parents driving their kids to school, along with every other parent driving theirs, adds more trips to the peak hour traffic period (probably close to doubles it). This is evident by how much congestion drops on school holidays.
More kids *should* use cycle, walking or take the bus, but then so should the adults;). Remember the bus? (think of Forrest Gump if you’re having trouble). But all these depend on safe routes (cycle lanes, etc.) and the public transport in place.
But perhaps handing out congestion charges around schools would help but only so long as other practical alternatives are in place. Schools need to work with parents & councils to sort out transport, and maybe consider things like (shock horror) buses and carpooling.
And as for giving up some 15mins walking time to take your kid to school. FFS, get organised and arrange a roster among parents who live in your area and organise a ‘walking bus’. Some ‘stay at home’ mums or shiftworking parents may have no trouble taking a group of kids together to school, and at worst you have one late morning per week where you take the group to school. Driving *IS* the lazy option, but with a bit of organisation there are more efficient ways.
Vote:July 29th, 2006 at 8:54 pm
Driving kids to school every day will not make them fat, allowing them to eat more calories than they expend will make them fat, simple.
Vote:July 29th, 2006 at 9:13 pm
And as for giving up some 15mins walking time to take your kid to school. FFS, get organised and arrange a roster among parents who live in your area and organise a ‘walking bus’. Some ‘stay at home’ mums or shiftworking parents may have no trouble taking a group of kids together to school, and at worst you have one late morning per week where you take the group to school.
So nice to get the patronising suggestions about how to manage my life. Is this what you do with your children? If so, that’s great. But what I need to save, every day, is time. I choose to do it by driving to work, and dropping the kids at school en route.
Lazy!!! Good grief! I work in paid employment, and at the end of the day, I come home and work the second shift as a parent, and so does my partner. Since when is that ‘lazy’? It’s my choice, but it ain’t ‘lazy’.
Vote:July 29th, 2006 at 9:40 pm
It is rare that I agree with Logix, but here I do. Sexual predation of children is, I assert, no more prevalent per head of population than it was when most of us were children walking or bussing to school. There is more of it, the population is larger, and it is perhaps far more widely reported in a sensationalist way. But it is probably no more dangerous than in the 50′s, 60′s and 70′s.
There are probably three main reasons why childrfen are driven to school much more than they used to be; working mothers (or, if you prefer, both parents working, but the change is in mothers working), a greater perception of risk or a change in how that risk is assessed, and because they can be.
Obesity is not particularly related to any of them, but is related to a lack of exercise more than excessive or inappropriate eating. I would think we ate a lot of fatty, starchy, food, (though exactly what bwe ate in total I can’t really recall) but we did seem to burn it off. TV was rarer and not on so long, no computer or related games meant more outside playing I reckon.
Banning is a typical anally retentive authoritarian response, and thus perfectly acceptable to a significant proportion of the left in this country.
Vote:July 30th, 2006 at 7:09 am
Being dropped of at school didn’t stop David Benson-Pope’s students from being leered at.
Vote:July 30th, 2006 at 12:38 pm
Logix, just as a matter of interest how many people in your office :-
1) Make the time to walk or bike to work, or at least take public transport?
2) Prepare their own lunches – which, of course, contain fresh fruit and vegetables rather than processed fats and sugars – rather than taking the easy step of buying a load of junk from the nearest lunch bar?
3) Always use the lift, because they can’t manage a couple of flights of stairs without discomfort?
And how many of you folks go home, and provide equally splendid role modelling to their children? Clinbing on the banned waggon is easy – and a very useful substitue for real change, which includes some less than flattering self-examination and inconvenient effort. Do you think any kid who is sent to school with a five dollar bill rather a healthy lunch is going to eat properly and exercise more because he’s got to waddle a little further to Burger King?
Vote:July 30th, 2006 at 1:52 pm
Craig,
You are quite right. Far too many adults have very poor food and exercise habits, that increasing affluence has allowed us to accumulate over the last 30 years or so. Adults are largely responsible for their own choices, children are much less so.
If you accept the point that increasing levels of food diets, less exercise, more obesity and consequent diabetes is a bad thing, then given that most adults are very reluctant to make uncomfortable changes unless they are compelled to do so, then it quite reasonable to makes smaller changes that make it easier for our children to make better choices.
Vote:July 30th, 2006 at 2:07 pm
Logix, just as a matter of interest how many people in your office :-
1) Make the time to walk or bike to work, or at least take public transport?
2) Prepare their own lunches – which, of course, contain fresh fruit and vegetables rather than processed fats and sugars – rather than taking the easy step of buying a load of junk from the nearest lunch bar?
3) Always use the lift, because they can’t manage a couple of flights of stairs without discomfort?
And how many of you folks go home, and provide equally splendid role modelling to their children? Clinbing on the banned waggon is easy – and a very useful substitue for real change, which includes some less than flattering self-examination and inconvenient effort. Do you think any kid who is sent to school with a five dollar bill rather a healthy lunch is going to eat properly and exercise more because he’s got to waddle a little further to Burger King?
Vote:July 31st, 2006 at 8:28 am
I see the common denominator here. Ban schools.
Vote:July 31st, 2006 at 10:03 am
O.K.
Vote:Who here really thinks being dropped off at school will make a blind bit of difference to exercise levels?… get a grip!
Apart from the sub-human freaks who prey on kids (I really really think a few of them horse whipped to death in public would be a good start.. but I always was a moderate) banning something like transport is a mindless lefty solution to any problem.
What say we use the tinyist hint of imagination and propose a funded club system for healthy activities, walking buses, homework discounts (they do less) if they gain so many points from a healthy activity club etc, etc.
July 31st, 2006 at 10:06 am
Llew:
You’re not thinking big enough. It’s one of the charming ironies of life that, while we fret about obesity at home, we don’t really give a damn who’s consuming all the unhealthy dairy products, fat-marbled meat and high end booze we’re exporting as fast as we can. Perhaps we should be encouraging our trading partners to re-frame trade barriers as a public health measure, and sue New Zealand for our contribution to their expanding health costs; once our major export industries have collapsed, then we’re going to have to be more virtuous. Aren’t we?
Vote:July 31st, 2006 at 10:08 am
And may as well ban Murray, while we’re at it.
Vote:July 31st, 2006 at 11:04 am
Can I put in a plug for banning Jason Gunn?
Vote:July 31st, 2006 at 11:44 am
“The MPs also learned from the Heart Foundation that in a typical week 55,882 pies – but only 3922 pieces of fruit – were sold in New Zealand’s primary and intermediate schools.”
I’m sceptical of these figures… how many primary & intermediate school kids are there in NZ anyway?
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