Not child’s play

Suffer the little children to us, said the poetess. And now it seems that the children are suffering in more ways than we can imagine. High blood pressure at the age of six sounds ludicrous and indeed it is. We have always been given to understand that hypertension is a disease of the middle-aged, especially those given to a middle that’s spreading. But little children?

Unfortunately, that may be so, says some new research. The new targets are children between the ages of 3 to 18. Much of it goes undetected, since few expect children to have it at all. More distressing is the fact that the reasons for childhood hypertension are the same as for adults — stress and lifestyle choices. That is, too much junk food and not enough exercise. The stress that children feel is often transferred to them from the adults around them. That’s possibly why in earlier times, people were less open around their children and did not share with them intimate details of their marital and financial conditions. Children are liable to interpret such confessions in absolute terms, which may have far reaching consequences — more than the adult may have conjectured.

Junk food and lack of exercise, though, are aspects of life today that we know are avoidable but are too lazy to do anything about. It is easy to buy and eat readymade food with high quantities of fat and sugar in them — think pizzas and colas — that make them appealing to children.

The connection between lack of exercise and high blood pressure is even easier to make. In today’s world, children do not go down to play any more and the more well-off the parents are, the more likely they only undertake structured and monitored activities. Of course, it is also true that in many big cities — and Mumbai is most culpable here — there is nowhere to play. What could have become a playground is much more valuable, money wise, as an apartment complex or a shopping mall. The American singer Cat Stevens asked long ago where the children would play and the answer is very clear: nowhere.

It seems very clear, then, that the main reason for the hypertension in the life of children is adults. Earlier, according to fairytales, they only had to battle witches, ogres and dragons. Now they have to fight the pressure to perform academically no matter what, have to produce the strength to say no to pizza, to television, to the computer, their MP3 player and all the rest. Any initiative to deal with this problem will have to consider the issue holistically, including creating more playgrounds in city planning. But parents cannot escape responsibility; the battle to fight this curse starts with them.