Should Children Run?

Of course children should run! Running should be as much a part of children’s lives as walking, skipping, playing tag, and so on. It should be a normal part of their play. For preteens, play can and should be the major source of physical activity. Some researchers have estimated that when kids are left to their own devices, they’ll cover as much as six miles a day on foot. Obviously, they don’t cover this distance all at once, and it’s a lot different from when an adult goes out for a six-mile run or walk, but that’s OK. At that age, most experts would agree, what you want is for your children to be active in a variety of activities that they enjoy.
Of course, many kids aren’t active. The average American teenager watches 22 hours of TV a week. Keep that in mind as you ponder these scary statistics: Only one-third of children ages 6 to 17 meet minimum standards of cardiovascular fitness. Of children between the ages of 5 and 8, 40 percent are obese, meaning that they weigh at least 20 percent more than they should. According to one survey of children in grades 4 to 12, 49 percent of boys and 62 percent of girls get nine hours or less of physical activity each week. When you consider that these estimates likely include a lot of time standing around on a ball field during gym classes, the figures seem even worse.
Now the question of whether children should run changes. Should children run in an organized way, for fitness, the way that adults do? That one’s a bit trickier to answer.