Earlier this month the headline screamed at me: “99% of GTA children not getting enough exercise: study.” That’s hard to ignore. When the findings are that across-the-board, even parents with active, athletic kids have to ask themselves, ‘Is my kid getting enough exercise?’

Did you see this study? If you missed it, here’s the gist. Researchers in Toronto recently visited 16 schools and fitted 856 kids in Grades 5 and 6 with gizmos called accelerometers. Then they tracked and recorded kids’ actual activity, not—ahem—self-reported activity. In a city like Toronto, researchers expected “children to perform better than the national average, given that there are more opportunities and resources here,” reported the Toronto Star. What they found was crushing:
- 99% of GTA children don’t get enough exercise (that is, 60 minutes of “moderate to vigorous” activity per day)
- girls fared significantly worse than boys—getting 24 minutes of a day to boys’ average 35 minutes.

I’m the mom of one highly athletic and active Grade 3 boy (he fights to wear shorts in November and seems to vibrate even when sitting still). So I figured we have to be in that other 1%, right? ‘How could my son not be getting 60 minutes of activity per day?’

So I created a chart (you can see it below) and set out to track as accurately as I could how much activity my son is getting. In the absence of an accelerometer, my results are far more subjective, but I tried to be as honest as I could.

What I found was somewhat hopeful—Zach seems to meet the minimum daily activity requirements, if not a bit more. Even better, and this applies more broadly, his regular TDSB school day offers great opportunities to get active: through recess and lunch, and through scheduled gym class and pool time. Throw in some extra-curriculars and free play time, and on paper at least, getting 60 minutes seems totally doable.

But as the recent study showed, it’s not happening. And even parents like me, with highly active kids, have reason to worry. In fact, when I drill down into my chart, I see vulnerabilities at every step. Consider the following:
- Inactivity creep - My son is in Grade 3. Study participants were in Grades 5 and 6. Activity levels decrease over time. Scary.
- Lunch and recess – At our school, free time here adds almost 200 minutes per week. But the onus is largely on our kids to make the most of this time (and since parents aren’t there, it’s hard for us to gauge how this time is actually working). Plus, the older kids get the less cool it becomes to for example, chase your friends around playing tag. My son and his friends’ current favourite ways to enjoy free time include soccer, baseball, and various forms of tag. However, like my son says, some kids are starting to spend recess “just talking”. To him that’s still akin to torture, but I can see how that could change by the time he's the age of study participants.
- Uneven access to extra-curriculars – My son gets another good portion of his activity thanks to the fact that we have the ability to pay. But many extra-curriculars (like hockey) are expensive, putting kids from lower-income homes at a disadvantage. This year it's gotten even trickier due to the local teachers' union (EFTO) work action. Free after-school sports extra-curriculars were suspended this year (although that may be changing as I write). Big-picture, this means kids' organized sports involvement can be affected by economics and politics.
- Pool time threatened – Students at our school have a pool and swimming is part of the student curriculum. Not all TDSB students have this perk and even at our school, we’re always fighting to keep the pool open. The same goes for other community recreation centres. That’s another vulnerability.
- Ad hoc – These are the kinds of activities that give my son the most joy—impromptu street hockey games, Nerf-gun battles, after school tobogganing, tag, and baseball, not to mention the ping pong and soccer games he plays with us or his buddies in our rec room. The older he gets though, the more I see this changing. Weekends are scheduled up, friends are captivated by TV, their DS’s and Wii’s, and homework projects encroach on free time.
- Gender stereotypes - Many of the sports my son is involved in see less co-ed participation each year. Today, when it comes to sports, we still seem to cheer on our boys more—with the frightening result that girls are getting way less exercise.

Bottom line: Our kids do have some opportunities for activity each day but, like a great pile of Jenga blocks, the whole thing is just waiting to be knocked down. Getting our kids 60 minutes of solid activity per day is doable, but without a concerted family, school and community action plan, chances are it’s not going to happen.

My Chart:

SCHOOL ACTIVITY
School swim class: 1 x 30 minutes/wk or 30 minutes weekly
Gym class: 2 x 30 minutes/wk or 60 minutes weekly
Recess: 5 x 24 minutes/wk or 120 minutes weekly
Lunch: 5 x 15 minutes/wk or 75 minutes weekly
TOTAL 285 minutes weekly = 40.7 minutes per day

Extra-curriculars
Swimming lessons:  1 x 40 minutes or 40 minutes weekly
Hockey games: 1 x 20 minutes (40 min. total, real play=20 min.) or 20 minutes weekly
Hockey practice: Alternate weeks 1 x 60 minutes or 30 minutes weekly
Ball Hockey league: 1 x 60 minutes/wk (60 min. total=real play=50 min.) or 50 minutes weekly
TOTAL 140 minutes weekly = 20.0 minutes per day

Ad-hoc
Walk to school:  2 x 3 minutes/day or 30 minutes weekly
Playing outside or indoor sports (street hockey, running around, skating, soccer, ping pong):
    20 minutes/day or 140 minutes weekly
TOTAL: 170 minutes weekly = 24.3 minutes per day

WEEKLY TOTAL = 85 minutes per week

More:
- 99% of GTA children not getting enough exercise: study." The Toronto Star, March 4, 2013
- The actual study if you want to have a look:  How active are children in Toronto? A comparison with accelerometry data from the Canadian Health Measures Survey

This is a chilling tale of a bear I met on vacation.

But first I should probably ask if I'm the only one. Do family visits to the zoo ever make you uneasy too? And I’m not just talking about prices here. I'm talking about all those animals in their enclosures. Do you find yourself wondering about them? Ever since the story of the Toronto Zoo’s elephants exploded, there’s been lots of talk in our house about animals in captivity. If elephants are suffering so acutely—isolated and crushingly lonely, feet damaged and constantly infected from the concrete paths they were never meant to endure, dying prematurely—what about other animals? Are they suffering too?

What a fraught issue this is for families. On the one hand, viewing animals with our kids can invoke a rapturous joy and love of nature. I’ll always remember the way my son rushed at the aquariums at the zoo when he was a little guy. Nose-pressed, he would stand there endlessly captivated by these tiny flitting exotic fish. And doesn’t stuff like this give our kids a desire to respect and preserve the environment?

But more and more, zoo trips fill me with nagging questions. Here’s an example. On our recent March Break trip to Charleston, SC we visited Charlestown Landing, a historical state park which also features a small zoo. In the “Animal Forest”, you get to traipse along wooden boardwalks, masses of Spanish moss trailing in the breeze, and see animals that are (or were in olden days) native to the Lowcountry. As has become a habit for us, we critiqued the animals’ habitats. “The birds can’t fly away?!” my son asked eying all the netting around the seabird enclosure. There was little signage, so we couldn’t tell whether the egrets, pelicans and such, had been injured and rescued—or not. The otters, with their bubbling river and stone enclosure, seemed to be thriving though.

Then came the kicker. In the next enclosure, I stared straight into the eyes of a single black bear (although reportedly he has a roommate). It felt Alice-in-Wonderland strange. Perched on a wooden structure, placid and still, he looked like an overstuffed toy. Maddeningly though, I couldn’t find any details about this bear. What was the back story here? “I’ve got to look into this,” I told myself.

Well today I did. And the story that I uncovered about this bear literally gave me chills. Just a couple of clicks on Google and I found the story of “Memphis”. Last year, this 450-pound black bear was found “in the backyard of a Lowcountry residence, chained to a tree or pacing back and forth in a small dog trot”. I also read that South Carolina is “the only state where keeping bears and other wild animals, even cobras, is legal.”

While Memphis is safe now, some black bears in the state have seen a worse fate. My brief search also turned up news of an unspeakable underground practice of animal abuse that apparently still occurs today in Pakistan and South Carolina. It’s called “bear baying”. In 2010, the Associated Press broke the story including video evidence of baying events. I still haven’t been able to bring myself to watch what’s happening to these bears or even write about it in my own words but here’s how the Humane Society of the United States describes it. I’ll warn you. This is really tough to read:

“A black bear cowers in the corner of a pen in rural South Carolina. She is tethered to a stake, surrounded by hundreds of onlookers.

She is foaming at the mouth and popping her jaws, behavior that means she is terrified. Her captors have cut or removed her claws and many of her teeth, leaving her defenseless.

Three hounds run at the bear from one end of the arena, barking furiously. Some of them bite her face and legs. Others jump on her. She backs up on her hind legs, trying vainly to shield her face. The assault continues for four hours, as nearly 300 dogs attack her in quick succession.

This spectacle is a bear baiting competition, called a "bear bay" by participants, and is practiced only in South Carolina. It is similar to the archaic blood sport of bear baiting.”

HSUS investigators videotaped this scene during visits to four bear baiting events in the state hosted by breed clubs associated with American Kennel Club and United Kennel Club. According to attendees, the bear used in some of these events was a 15-year-old female taken from the wild as a cub.

On its website, the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources has this statement:

Please know that S.C. Department of Natural Resources (SCDNR) does not consider bear baying/baiting a legitimate field trial and has never issued and will not issue permits for this activity.

As required by SC law, the only captive bears the SCDNR has permitted are those that were in captivity before January 1, 2006, and for which owners provided proof of possession prior to that date. No additional permits will be or have been issued for the captive possession of black bears in South Carolina, other than those legally possessed in another state and brought into South Carolina for temporary exhibition.

SCDNR does not consider the possession of black bears by individuals to be biologically sound, safe for the local community, or in the best long-term interest of the wild black bear resource. No further reproduction of captive black bears will be allowed in South Carolina.

In 2008, the South Carolina Attorney General issued an opinion that it is possible for bear baying/baiting to be prosecuted as animal cruelty under Title 47.

Activists maintain that an underground baying practice continues to exist. And petitions against this continue to circulate.

Asking questions about Memphis the bear led me to a horrible story of inhumanity, but I uncovered some signs of hope too. While Memphis endured years of mistreatment and is now unable to cope in the wild, he's been rescued and found a home at Charlestown Landing. And apparently there’s no evidence Memphis endured baying. Is the Animal Forest the best place for him? I don’t know, but I also know, he’s in a far better place today—and that things could be infinitely worse.

Sometimes zoos present us with stories like this. And sometimes on a simple trip to the zoo we encounter plenty of gray areas and ethical juggernauts. But there's more to the story. Zoos are also evolving, aiming to rescue animals, and/or protect and encourage endangered species. They're also looking at completely altering their animal environments. I think it’s worth staying in the loop, visiting zoos, and most of all, asking lots of hard questions. After all, for the Toronto Zoo’s elephants, it was such questions—from one passionate city councillor named Michelle Berardinetti—that changed everything. As I write, three weary elephants, Toka, Thika and Iringa, are reportedly this close to being loaded onto military helicopters and winging their way towards the warm embrace of a California sanctuary. I think that’s pretty awesome.

More:
"Rescued bear now living at Charles Towne Landing," Post and Courier
"Investigation Documents Cruelty of Bear Baiting," The Humane Society of the United States, August 2010
"Uncovered in South Carolina: Bear Abuse for Show", Huffington Post, August 23, 2010
"Information Regarding Bear Baying/Baiting," www.dnr.sc.gov/admin/bearbb.html
"Zoo's elephants will be sent to sanctuary," Toronto Star, October 25, 2011
"RCAF Asked to Help Transport Three Toronto Zoo Elephants to California:Zoo Check," Montreal Gazette, March 21, 2013

After much agonizing, I did it. 

February 1st, 2013 marked the first day in my adult life where no newspaper thwacked against my door in the predawn chill. Ignoring the telemarketers trying to woo me back, I’m giving the paper boy a pass and experimenting with new ways to get my news.

Admittedly, newsprint is still my preferred medium, especially with good coffee flowing through my veins, and--listen up, guys I live with--the TV turned off. But chances to chill have become rare.

In the early parenting years, paper reading degenerated to rereading the same sentence 20 times while my coffee got cold. Today, my son needs me less. But life hasn't slowed down and I still hardly ever get to read anything in that focused, beautiful way. As 2012 closed, I faced facts. We were recycling days’ worth of newsprint no one had read and I thought, ‘Why not ditch it and see what happens?’

It’s early days, but so far, getting my news fix is kind of fun. It involves a salad of methods: nightly TV news; online publications and websites; Facebook and real-time chatter with friends; bits of NPR and CBC radio; blazing headlines at the grocery checkout; crunched up notices in my son’s backpack; some print magazines; and the fat papers we grab at the hockey rink on weekends.

Some observers see disaster in this scattershot consumption, that social media especially, is destroying our attention spans and encouraging us to eat only dessert (i.e., let’s skip Syria and go straight to the Kardashian baby bump news).

Other pundits disagree. Traditional newspapers, they argue, claim to contain a balanced day's helping of global news but are actually products of large media outlets with various biases. (I got a perspective on this in the 1990s while volunteering for a year in Kenya in refugee advocacy work. I encountered victims of civil war and genocide, slum dwellers, and street children, as well as amazing grassroots-level activists. A lot didn't get covered back home. As I learned, North American media outlets are simply disinclined to pick up too many offshore stories, no matter how compelling.)

Social media defenders say the digital age is democratizing news, bringing us the type of unconventional and far-flung stories most media outlets have long ignored (an example here is the story of young Pakastani girl Malala Yousafzai which got a tremendous boost on social media).

Is it the better way? I’m still undecided. My paperless news diet is tasty but I haven’t shaken the feeling stuff is going to fall through the cracks. Will a daily paper thud back onto our veranda ever again? That remains to be seen.

How about you? Where do you get your daily news fix? 
Are your habits changing?