Where does the buck stop?

A study this week revealed that parents want schools to take a bigger role in teaching their children the core values of honesty and fairness. For me, this brings in to focus the bigger questions. What is the purpose of our schools? What is the role of parents? Up to a point, the parents are justified in making this request. The role of schools though should ideally be to build on the good work which has already been done in the home beforehand. Ideally. Of course, not everyone lives in this ideal world. Also in the news this week has been the charity NICHS (Chest, heart and stroke). They have highlighted that just 43% of 7 year olds are getting the recommended one hour of exercise per day. In short, the spectre of childhood obesity refuses to go away. The Chief Executive of NICHS has called for greater cooperation between parents, schools, food producers, government and health charities in a bid to address this problem. He is quite right to highlight this problem but I feel he is being somewhat naive in his call. The first bit and the last bit are fine because parents, schools and health charities all have vital roles to play in either getting the right message out or in just providing help and support. I have a bit of a problem with the other two. Because our government is so beholden to the food producers and manufacturers, it is hard to see how child health can benefit. Let me be clear. The state of California has recently banned trans fats from all its restaurants and supermarkets because they, like Denmark, recognise the adverse health effects of these hidden killers. Despite a lot of campaigning, trans fats are still to be found ubiquitously on the shelves of our supermarkets. They were supposed to have been banned but haven't been. The food manufacturuers are answerable to their shareholders who expect a nice dividend on their shares every year. The food manufacturers therefore lobby the government (for lobby you can use harangue) to death in order to keep their profitable products on the shelves. Not profitable to the health of the people who eat them. Profitable to the people who make and sell them. Child health like adult health is the culmination of several factors. It is down to what you choose to eat, how much exercise you decide to take and a variety of other factors including the environment in which we live. Getting children to undertake exercise is just one piece of the jigsaw albeit a very important one. Getting them to understand which foods are good and which aren't is a lot more challenging. If we start our children on diets high in sugar and fat, it is little wonder that they subsequently become accustomed to more of the same. By definition, this is therefore the place where parents can make all the difference. Likewise, if we, as entire families, sit in front of the TV as a matter of course, we can't reasonably expect too much else from the next generation. Again, the parents have a huge role to play. The schools should be the ones who take up the baton after the hard work has been done at home. To expect them to put right what has been pre-programmed in the first two or three years of life is somewhat unfair. So what about honesty and fairness? Are we being honest with ourselves if we put the wrong foods in ourselves or neglect our health through lack of exercise? Given the overwhelming body of evidence, I think we are. But we must always remain respectful of those who elect not to for fear of becoming a quasi totalitarian state mustn't we? Not if we want the NHS to remain free at the point of access. In the end, we can't have it both ways because the numbers just don't add up. That is where the fairness becomes apparent...