Brendan Hyndman's research has been taken up by The Conversation, a Leftist university based organisation. The trouble with these researches is that most of us don't have the interest, the skill or the time to put them under the microscope. So, there might be a problem with Australian kids not getting off their "butts" (Americanism) - or there might not. Either way, this piece of research, like most studies, will be shelved to gather dust, and the lives of kids won't be affected by it. Thankfully.

My parents were far from perfect, but one thing that I am am grateful for is that they didn't force me to play sport and do horrible, sweaty, often dangerous, physical activities.

"Thus for all these reasons, kids won't get out to play very often. You can forget your Don Bradmans and Ian Thorpes and Cathy Freemans. The sporting Aussie will be a thing of the past."

The 'sporting Aussie' SHOULD be a thing of the past, and with current poor performances in world competition, if will be sooner rather than later.

Three cheers. It's time our obsession with sport (mainly as spectators) ended. We need people with big brains, not big muscles, if we are to resist the growing threats to the West

In some Asian societies, the school day averages around 8 hours or two hours more than we? Those extra 2 hours could include homework and at least one hour of PE or a sports competition, only avoidable with a countersigned medical certificate, that can not include morbid obesity. Which should then allow the obese to have their PE/sports comps, to be conducted exclusively in the pool!

Today both parents are abut compelled to both be working holding down individual jobs to be able to afford the mortgage or price gouged rent. Thus they are all too often consumed by the day to day realities of survival, not spending time with kids, who all too often are isolated behind screens of welded to smartphones?

Our society has been sold down the river and at the behest of property developers and landlords! Who are the ones who've built the concrete jungles and demand the price-gouged premiums?

Arguably given far too much prominence and power in a de-industrial society

Only made possible by asinine spit lickle governments?

We could do so much better if only we had men and women with future vision at the helm, with the courage of conviction, backbones and ears that still work, along with with genuine concern for the least among us and the patently missing integrity.

And rated in the honesty stakes at present, somewhere south of used car salesmen selling deathtrap rust buckets to kids?

Given kids are exposed to all this and incompetent corrupt governments all combining via inactivity and hopeless energy policies that all but guarantee our kids will have no future or a hellish one?

Why should they get up off of their butts? WTF ging hell is the point?
Alan B.

Here's Alan B and myself on the same page again.

...*Our society has been sold down the river and at the behest of property developers and landlords! Who are the ones who've built the concrete jungles and demand the price-gouged premiums?...*

We are not observing an underactive overly obese society, but actually a " youthless" one.
If you really wish for an engaged society, radical changes will need to appear in the housing opportunity given to young families.

Flogging the limited resources of families forced into a lifetime of ever increasing rent payments is not good.
Forcing this escalating loser-class into short term leases which marginalise their children through multiple schools, and breed an unattachment instinct for life, is not good.

Presenting a quasie sentiment of care over youth, by branding each and every one of them (it would seem), with a victimhood status; particularly a mental disability excuse to disengage forever from a normal human and productive world, is not good.

Access to the internet should be restricted to those older than twenty one. Follow The example of Iran, and shut it down altogether as an alternative, would be good for youth by offering them the opportunity and the time, to smell the roses.

Dan

Dear Dan,

«Access to the internet should be restricted to those older than twenty one.»

The internet is only a symptom. We do need all this silly technology in order to compensate and support the ever increasing number of people - without it people would starve for food, with it, people starve for meaning.

The article discusses a particular shortage, but shortages there must be, if not this than that, for the blanket is just too short. The number of people on earth is far too high, it is no longer a suitable place for new human bodies: souls ought to queue up and wait for their turn rather than push to come here all at the same time.

Regarding the article's title, what failed is family-planning and if kids are lazy then it is for a good reason: life in these crowded conditions lacks purpose.

Family planning? Ha!

God gives men and women the ability to have kids. From about 11 or 12 in most cases, and kids are growing up faster.
It's up to the parents to work out how to limit the family to what they can manage.

Look at kids in supermarkets today. They do what they want. Good forbid anyone should give them a smack or threaten to take away their pastimes

Dear Waverley,

«It's up to the parents to work out how to limit the family to what they can manage.»

And how many would-be-parents could afford a child, even one, if they truly had to pay all the expenses involved (including health and education) without any government support?

Hi Yuyutsu,

" .... life in these crowded conditions .... " ?

Australian homes are bigger than ever. We're having fewer children than ever. Without immigration and the refugee quota, our population wouldn't be rising at all.

Perhaps it's the helicopter-parent generation coddling the kids ? In my day .....

Joe

The insanity of the academic social engineers has brought us to this stage. How much longer can we tolerate these morons ?

Is this a report on a report that states the obvious?

Well I'm going to go with:
For girls - Addicted to YouTube on the iPad;
For boys - Addicted to TV and gaming consoles in their bedrooms.

With all this decline in activity, one issue.
How will Australia compete on the world stage? Years ago in Bradman's day our cricket team carried all before it. Our swimmers led the world: the Konrads kids, Dawn Fraser, Henricks and WIndle. Our tennis champions were legends: Hoad, Rosewall, Court, Goolagong.

Now our cricket team struggles. Our Wallabies are a disaster. Our swimmers are doing OK, depending on whether they allow Sun Yang to swim (some minor issue about whether this 6 foot seven Chinese has been taking helper-drugs....).

We will only be doing well at couch-sitting, Googling and beer-drinking.

As someone raising grandkids, and with 25 grandkids all up, I see the problem as partly the obsession with internet based activities, including social media, and poor diet causing obesity and thus less interest in physical activity. Also, the lack of affordable sports activities is an issue.
Some sports, like acro dance, gymnastics, tennis coaching etc cost up to $15/hour, which when coupled with costs of uniforms, competition entry fees etc gets really expensive, specially if you have several children.
Team sports, like football and netball cost less but have a fairly short season and not all kids are into aggressive type sports.
I have a group of grandchildren who walk to school and back together each day and this is an activity parents could arrange in their suburbs, so that kids at least get that activity every day

Dear Joe,

«Australian homes are bigger than ever.»

This trend is changing. More people are forced into apartments with little or no garden/yard area, which is especially detrimental in the context of this article because children lack outdoor play-space.

«We're having fewer children than ever. Without immigration and the refugee quota, our population wouldn't be rising at all.»

One cannot look at Australia in isolation.
World population has been too high for about 2000 years and the effect is cumulative, even if birth-rate has slightly eased recently in Australia.

In this climate, if we don't want to be flooded and bought off with foreign goods or even to be outright invaded by other countries and/or their refugees, then we are forced to compete and defend ourselves against other countries with greater and denser populations.

Now in order to compete and defend ourselves, we cannot avoid regimentation and state-oppression, a painful price to pay. The aboriginal population of Australia until the 18th century, about 750,000, was just about right (taking into account the arid inland), but alas what could they do when the white men from overpopulated continents invaded? They lived close to heaven with no state (or other central organisation), no modern weapons and no industry, so they could not defend themselves nor compete with the white-man's industrial goods, hence they easily succumbed.

To avert this oppressive regimentation, population needs to be reduced around the globe, down to a level of about 100-200 million people. Area-wise this would mean an Australian population of 5-10 millions, but given the uninhabitable arid inland, the aboriginal number of 750,000 is closer to the mark.

«Perhaps it's the helicopter-parent generation...»

I am not familiar with this term.

What I can say is, that as a child in 1st grade, I used to walk to school and back on my own, a kilometre away, including through an open field and a forest. It was an important experience which sadly today's kids miss.

Hi Yuyutsu,

Where to start ? So far, there is no such thing as 'too much population', it depends on technology and primarily the production of food. Modern food technology is vastly more productive than 2000 years ago; food production has doubled in just the last fifty years or so.

As for your observation, that

" .... The aboriginal population of Australia until the 18th century, about 750,000, was just about right (taking into account the arid inland), but alas what could they do when the white men from overpopulated continents invaded? They lived close to heaven with no state (or other central organisation) ...."

Well, the Aboriginal population would have fluctuated between (very roughly) 250,000 and 750,000, mainly because of the long-term effects of droughts. Life was incredibly hard in many parts of Australia, and only the ingenuity of people in difficult circumstances enables groups to survive. Living in such harsh conditions was amazing, but hardly close to heaven. Since the evils of colonisation fell upon them, their population has stabilised in far more (comparatively) affluent conditions. They now have the benefits of Toyotas, air-conditioning, medical services and ATMs.

Yes, our generation walked to school, barefoot, rain or shine. I don't think my parents who loved us totally, ever visited our schools. I still recall my jumper which I wore for a couple of years before it fell apart. We roamed far and wide around Bass Hill, built dams across the dirt road when it rained in order to piss off drivers. Cut ourselves, got ourselves poked in the eye, scabbed our knees and caught yabbies in dams. I recall cutting my bare feet many times tramping over the abandoned aircraft-wreck yard over near Villawood. Finding boxes of old books and magazines in the paper-bark scrub.

Ou parents probably knew nothing about this. Great times !

Joe

Yuyutsu

I thought your reference to walking through the forest an appropriate one for this article.

Were you as Goldilocks, a wayward child, or as red riding hood, a dedicated child?

I would also hope you avoided the outcome of Hansel and Gretel. Taken to the dark woods by their father, to be eaten by the witch.

Your reference: maybe kids should be forced to live for a period of their childhood in Iran. That experience would be sobering and life forming.
I notice a growing trend with Chinese Australians to send their infants back to China to be cared for by Grandparents. Cost of living is too high in Australia.

World population is exponentially driven; the higher the population, the faster it grows.

Dan

ok boomer

Hi Joe, did Keith Malcolm have the BP service station at Bass Hill in your day.

In my pre teens, just after the war, we lived on the approach road to Castle Hill Townsville. A group of us regularly went goat hunting on the hill. Armed with our Lawyer cane bows & read arrows, we were quite the big game hunters.

We never actually saw a goat, but were sure the wallaby poo everywhere was evidence that goats were there. Barefoot like you, [what returned soldier could afford shoes for their kids, even on the occasions when there were any to buy], we would climb hundreds of feet up that near mountain most afternoons.

In 1946 there was only one girl who had shoes in my class. Perhaps what we need today is our kids barefoot & mobile phone-less, to give them some connection with reality.

I looked around a gathering recently, with about 10 kids from 10 to 16 or so. All bar one had their noses buried in their phones. The big question is, who's fault is that?

Why are you people talking as if kids of today are similar to kids of years gone by. For one thing most of the kids I see in Sydney are mostly Chinese. and the Chinese are not interested in the things that you people are interested in. They're into making money and looking after the ancestors so they send their children to cram schools in order to get them into university to get into business and the professions to make lots of money to look after the ancestors. As one writer pointed out: every Chinese is born a future ancestor.

You guys really need to visit Sydney and have a look around to see what Australia's first Chinese city looks like. And ScuMo and his mates are bringing in more but now spreading them out into the country towns so that they can buy up all of the real estate and businesses there as well. I wonder how many more Gladys Lius ScuMo and his mates are planning to put into Parliament.

Dear Hasbeen,

Given what you just said that makes you 95 years old.

Hi Hasbeen,

Halfway between Bass Hill and Chester Hill - no shops, no service station, just dirt roads, back in the early fifties. After we left, they built a drive-in across the road. That would have been our introduction to civilisation if we'd stayed. It seemed like a mile to Chester Hill school, maybe more. I remember when one kid up that way, dressed as Superman, jumped in front of the train.

One problem for kids these days is that they need far more solid skills than fifty or seventy years ago, certainly with technology, and more resilience. But maybe, for every generation of kids, while some do very well, some fall by the wayside. I was extremely lucky that an encyclopedia salesman came by, dropped off a set with no down payment, and never came back again. Wow, free. They were our TV and games system, all in one. I learnt about three years in one year.

Maybe each generation needs quite different skills from its parents. Certainly parents have to be mindful of that, so as not to raise their kids as if nothing had changed. In that sense, the worst that a parent can do is to raise their kids to follow too closely in their footsteps.

Joe

that makes you 95 years old.
Mr Opinion,
Amazing, an 80 year age gap between the two of you !

Dear Joe,

«So far, there is no such thing as 'too much population', it depends on technology and primarily the production of food.»

I agree and suspect that indeed, if all that matters is food and the like, then new technology could support an even higher population than today.

However, I am not of the view that life is just about food, physical survival and material goods. They are only the means, not an end.

---

Dear Dan,

«Were you as Goldilocks, a wayward child, or as red riding hood, a dedicated child?»

The latter, I presume, because the only reason I went the school, where I was heavily bullied, was to save my parents from jail. I knew it all anyway, what they taught there, like Joe I already read all the encyclopaedias, but I was told that it is the law that if parents fail to send their child to school then they are sent to prison. I loved my parents very much - a little hero I was!

Don't do an arts degree folks, or you could end up with math as bad as the Mr Os.

Just for you MrO, 95 years from 1946 would make today 2041. Perhaps you should buy a calculator rather than use your fingers & toes.

Yuyutsu, I feel sorry for you, I really do.

Yes going to many different schools meant I was bullied too, but once I learned to fight that stopped.

Learning to read, wright & do a bit of math was really interesting, then later physics & a bit of Calculus was fascinating.

If you learned how to play football, & hit a cricket ball you made the school teams, & were an accepted part of the school much more quickly. I don't know what was the most exciting, the day I scored my one & only try for the school team, or the day I found I'd managed 3 honors in my matriculation.

Yes school was really great, about as much fun as landing a jet on an aircraft carrier, racing around Bathurst, or sailing around the Pacific islands. It is a real pity you did not get to enjoy what is a highlight in so many lives.

Interesting to find others who have read an encyclopaedia. I bought a 27 volume set of Britannica in Honiara, [Solomon Islands] from someone returning to England. I read the lot in a couple of years while sailing. A great way to spend a day while wafting along very slowly in the doldrums.

Individual,

What, only eighty years ?

Joe

Some of you asked about helicopter parents.

When we grew up post-1945, kids has stuff to do, Some of us were altar boys- get up at 615, go up the street for 7 o clock Mass. Then have breakfast

All kids had chores- most, really: feed chooks, look after cows, help get younger ones dressed. Kids were expected to pitch in "You're not the star boarder, get this done"

Kids walked to school or to the train or bus or tram.

Today's parents tend to be busy watching over kids when not buried in their phones and iPads. Hence- hovering like a helicopter, before taking kids ti school in the car. Or taking them to the bus, etc. They're afraid of doing the wrong thing and being judged, I guess

Dear Hasbeen,

It was I typing error. It was supposed to be 85, assuming you were 10 at the end of WW2.

Dear Hasbeen,

You should stop telling everyone you don't have an Arts degree. That sort of comment makes you look ignorant.

Misopinionated,

Now, THAT sort of comment makes you look ignorant. Maybe just wait until you get to uni. In a few years - not long now !

To more important issues:

About helicoptering parents: mine certainly weren't, we were all too busy trying to survive in the late forties. When I was six or seven, living in Chullora (now up-marketed to Greenacre), my little brother and I would catch the bus to Strathfield, take the train from there to Homebush, and get the bus to the primary school there, next to Arnott's. I don't recall ever being worried or our mum being concerned. It was just what you did, or had to do. No biggie.

Perhaps it's a more vicious world now. I worry about my adult daughter going for her regular walk through the local parks and tracks. A bit of a rough neighbourhood, not too many helicopter parents around here. Actually, I can hear a police siren now. No, it's just an ambulance.

Joe

Some great points made here- but how many of you get an hour's hard exercise every day?

Every week?
No?
Once a month?

Experts recommend hard or HIIT training weekly. Not to do so risks problems of all kinds especially cardio vascular. And as we age, muscles must move in hard exercise to strengthen bones.

Any person who smokes, or drinks to excess, is also asking for trouble. We can't expect kids to do more than we do ourselves.

Dear Hasbeen,

You should stop telling everyone you don't have an Arts degree. That sort of comment makes you look ignorant. Perhaps Mr O, but no where as ignorant as the fools doing Arts courses when I did my BSc.

There was so little in their courses that they spent half their time going to idiot protests, chanting fool things like "what do we want .......".

Did anyone see the report in ABC that there are huge numbers of cheat-centres?
Maybe you're right- a degree isn't worth much these days

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-12-01/chinese-students-paid-to-ghost-write-for-australia-uni-students/11725330

Waverley,

The universities have become clearing centres for mainly Chinese students using their Australian degrees as a ticket towards a permanent residency visa. You don't honestly believe that the Chinese are enrolling in Australian universities for their educational value? You would have to be pretty naive to believe that.

Hasbeen,

You told me you have a BSc (Eng) from Sydney Uni. I'm an alumnus of Sydney and I don't recall it ever awarding a BSc (Eng). To my knowledge it only ever awarded a BE. Would you like to check your testamur to see what it says. Let me guess: You've lost it so you can't check it. Don't worry, Loudmouth has a dozen degrees and he could lend you one of his.

Misopinionated,

So they had a degree in environmental sociology at the Uni of Sydney back in the day ? Really ?

Why your obsession with bits of paper ? You really sound like you've only just graduated with your one and only bit of paper.

Joe

of course it's well known that many foreigners get a student visa so they can try to wangle PR
-permanent residence here.

Some students mysteriously seem to be buying large expensive properties as well.

Loudmouth,

Instead of throwing up red herrings as usual, why don't you do something useful and help Hasbeen find his BSc (Eng) testamur. Or lend him one of your dozen degrees. Just erase the BS (Artist) and type over BSc (Eng).

An Irishman was going to a job interview and he told his mates how excited he was. They waited outside when he went in.
They were amazed when he came out with clothes in a mess, looking sheepish.
"What happened, mate?" They asked

"Well it was all going well when this woman asked me to pull out my testimonials. OK, I thought. A bit unusual. But I took my daks down- and they threw me out"

Misopinionated,

'Red herring' ? You keep talking about people's uni qualifications, and you claim to have one yourself. So how is it misleading to query the basis for those qualifications ?

Any chance of getting back to topic ?

Joe

Back to topic?
Are we talking about lazy kids or lazy parents ..........or what?