Poor children! Look what they have to deal with. Epidemics of drugs, medical and non-medical. An obesity epidemic. A fast-food epidemic, related to the obesity epidemic. There is a TV epidemic, also related! There is an indoors epidemic, related too. Some of them have to deal with a daddy-gone epidemic (also related–no daddy, less outdoor activity).Others, with a mummy-bussing-meh-tail epidemic (related–mummy depressed equals less home cooking equals more fast food equals fat). And then you have the politicians-fooling-we epidemic. This is a bit different to the others but just as catching. It's also related to the obesity outbreak; just look at the physical changes in our elected officials since elections. Lots of jaw movements there.There is also something called a nature-deficit-disorder epidemic; this is similar to the indoors epidemic. It's about children spending too much time indoors rather than outdoors and the effects of this behaviour on them.
It's children spending too much time staring at video screens or sequestered by their parents at home because of the threat of kidnapping or who are not allowed to run about freely.It affects children obsessed with TV and computer games or are driven from sport to sport and miss "the restorative effects that come with the nimbler bodies, broader minds and sharper senses that are developed during random running-around at the relative edges of civilisation," as the inventor of the name, Richard Louv, says.Nature-deficit disorder creates a sense of boredom in children, a restlessness born of too much sitting or lying down, mindlessly absorbing trivia while activating the masticatory and swallowing muscles only. Obesity, anxiety, queroulousness and misbehaviour are its companions. Long term it translates into heart attacks, high blood pressure, strokes, diabetes, loss of self esteem and flatus.There's now evidence that it also affects the eyes.
As a child, whenever I was indoors (indoors is relative in the Port-of-Spain of the 40s and 50s where every room in the house was flooded by sunlight by 7 am) I used to walk around with my nose in a book. I was constantly being told that if I read too much or if I read in poor light, I would go blind and that I should stop reading so much and go outside. Sure enough,
by Exhibition class, I was wearing glasses.Last year a study from the University of Cambridge of almost 1,000 school-aged children showed, for the first time, that time spent outdoors decreased shortsightedness among children and adolescents. For every extra hour that a child spent outdoors a week, the risk of becoming myopic was reduced by two per cent. Such a simple thing. Increasing time outdoors possibly reduces the risk of developing myopia and its progression in children and adolescents.
Four weeks ago, Taiwanese researchers also came up with similar findings: elementary school-aged children who spent more time playing outdoors were less likely to develop myopia than their peers who preferred to stay indoors during school recesses.At the same time in Denmark, researchers who studied myopic children found that seasonal changes in the number of daylight hours correlated significantly with indicators of myopia progression.The incidence of myopia decreases the more daylight hours there are, even during winter when daylight is present for about seven hours, but not as much as during the 17.5-hour days of summer.There has been an humungous outpouring of myopia research in the last decade. The reason for this is the increase in prevalence of myopia during the second half of the 20th century. For example, myopia prevalence has increased in the US from 25 per cent in1972 to 41.6 per cent in 2004. The prevalence has increased even more dramatically in Asia.
Ninety per cent of college students in Taiwan wear glasses. In previous generations, the prevalence was about 10 per cent. In the Taiwanese study, the myopia prevalence in the primary school children was nearly 50 per cent.The evidence that the outdoors is necessary for proper development of vision is so persuasive that two schools in Taiwan began a simple intervention with their students. In one school, they turned off classroom lights and encouraged children go outdoors during their 80 minutes of recess from class each day. In the control school, there were no special recess programmes, and children were allowed to stay indoors during recess periods.
Both groups had the usual two hours of outdoor physical education per week. At the end of a year, the researchers retested the children's eyes. The measurements showed a lot fewer new cases of myopia in the test group.Apparently exposure to bright, natural light is needed for children's eyes to grow and develop.The data is in. If children spend all their time on an iPad, or at video games or staring at the TV, or if they spend less than 1.5 hours outside every day, they're at risk of developing shortsightedness. Exactly how this works is not known, but it does raise the question: what else does being outdoors do to the other parts of children's brains?
