Growing up in Hawaii hawking ‘huli-huli chicken’ and “King’s Hawaiian bakery sweetbread” as school fundraisers made me realize that all those yummy smells wafting through the hallways would never fly these days.
Candy bars and hot malasadas (those puffy fried fat bombs like a sugar-dipped doughnut) were shamelessly hustled island-wide knowing full well a muumuu hides a bounty of cardinal fitness sins.
That was the pre-obesity era. Now kids get nailed if they bring in cupcakes to a birthday part for goshsakes, in typical “over-swing of the pendulum” regulatory nuttiness that we’re seeing transpire at public schools nationwide. (See recent NYTimes article here called, “Don’t Even Think of TouchingThat Cupcake”)
Tick-tock…the stopwatch has started for public health policy as wellness advocates scramble to find ways to get kids back on the right track of moderation and balance.
Now, Shaping Youth correspondent Rebecca Scritchfield reports that there’s a new school fundraiser selling Kid Fitness TV in superhero style, backed by a creative team including an Emmy Award-winning directorial and writing pair and partnerships with national fitness folks like NASPE involved. Interesting…
That’s right, in an attempt to find a ‘magic bullet’ to curb the chubby cherub chompers, this live, interactive crew is proposing that districts sell DVDs of the public tv series to the school community at $19.99 a pop. (55% of the proceeds will go to the district, targeting ages 2-8)
“Each episode incorporates physical activities, health recipes, nutritional tips, and educational segments to help prevent obesity. A school district with an average of 1,300 children in grades pre-K-5 can expect to potentially raise between $10,000 to $134,000, depending on whether a family buys one DVD or the complete series.” Um, okay.
I haven’t had a chance to check out the Kid Fitness school programs and tv series yet, so I’ll reserve judgment entirely, but I’m a bit incredulous thinking that the solution is buying media to sit on your ‘okole’ (Hawaiian for backside) and learn how to get fit.
It’s a novel school fundraising idea, I’ll grant you that, but give me action any ol’ day like Verb Yellowball’s viral marketing campaign for active play. Why, oh, why did the DHHS and CDC deflate a project with such potential?
What are your schools selling? Gift-wrap and magazines are tough on the trees…maybe we could sell jump ropes or pedometers or kick balls or something? Oops, that’s right, the soda and snack giants already marketed fitness in schools…
Clearly there’s a lot of this going around…Here’s Kaiser Permanente’s latest online game to curb childhood obesity, per this recent news release:
“Kaiser Permanente Launches Online Game to Encourage Healthy Behaviors Sep 26, 2007”
Kaiser Permanente on Tuesday released a Web-based video game designed to teach children ages 9 to 10 about eating healthy foods and being more physically active, Reuters reports. While playing “The Incredible Adventures of the Amazing Food Detective,” available in English and Spanish, children will follow the routines of eight culturally diverse characters whose health would benefit from healthy food and increased physical activity. Offered free of charge on Kaiser’s Web site, the game features printable scavenger hunts that teach children how to read food labels; provides instructions on how to test the sugar content of sodas; includes kid-friendly recipes and strength-training exercises; and suggests family activities that promote improved nutrition. To ensure the game does not promote sedentary behavior, developers incorporated an automatic shut-off function that locks children out of the game after they have played for 20 minutes, and it does not let them play again for one hour. Through a partnership with the children’s publisher Scholastic, Kaiser plans to distribute the game and supplementary materials to more than 5,000 U.S. public schools this month. Educators will receive a CD of the game, a corresponding teaching guide and a colorful wall poster with a month of healthy classroom ideas. In addition, Kaiser will provide family-oriented resources containing healthy tips and a family profile chart to facilitate goal setting. Ray Baxter, Kaiser’s senior vice president for community benefit, notes that the new game is part of Kaiser’s broader effort to address the childhood obesity epidemic by “surrounding kids with healthy messages and opportunities to make healthier choices at every touch point of their lives” (Baertlein, Reuters/Yahoo! News, 9/25/07; Kaiser Permanente release, 9/25/07).
Have you seen Kid Fitness? Its an excellent show that airs on PBS and it works. You don’t sit and watch it, Kid Fitness in interactive and encourages children to get up off the couch. My kids get up and exercise along with Kid Fitness and his friends. Not only are they watching the show over and over again and doing the exercises, but they are now asking me, would Kid Fitness eat that? They are choosing vegetables and fruits over junk food and they chose to stop drinking soda without me even having to tell them not to, all because of Kid Fitness.
Kid Fitness is also distributing the program to schools nation wide with the help of United Way. I found this press release on their website.
UNITED WAY OFFICE TEAMS UP WITH
KID FITNESS TO FIGHT AGAINST CHILDHOOD OBESITY
Partnership Embarks On A Plan To Use Our Nation’s School Systems To Teach, Promote, And Inspire Children To Lead Healthy Lifestyles
NEW YORK, Jul. 17 – The United Way of Greater Chattanooga and Kid Fitness, the award winning public television health and fitness show for children, have formed a partnership to encourage children from pre-school to 5th grade to exercise and eat properly.
The partnership will make the Kid Fitness For Schools Program: Fun Fitness Break, a seven-minute exercise program developed by some of the nation’s leading childhood health and fitness experts, available to every United Way office and affiliate across the country for the local school district. The program will be sponsored in a nationwide corporate fundraising program so the Kid Fitness For Schools Program can be placed in pre-K through 5th grade classrooms at no cost.
The Kid Fitness For Schools Program is successfully being used by almost 250,000 children in New York City Public schools.
This represents an unprecedented branding opportunity, as millions of public school students are expected to exercise — every day for 7 minutes — to the KidFitness branded content. We expect this to translate into extremely lucrative licensing opportunities for KidFitness, including leveraging the brand equity into multiple product lines.
“The best and most efficient way to enact change and combat the growing epidemic of childhood obesity is through our nation’s school systems,” said Linda McReynolds, Vice President of The United Way of Chattanooga. “This partnership with Kid Fitness further demonstrates our commitment to providing local solutions to educating children about the importance of physical activity and a healthy diet.”
Kid Fitness, which is broadcast nationally by PBS stations to more than 80-million homes, developed the Kid Fitness Fun Fitness Breaks to help schools achieve their physical activity goals and to fight the rising childhood obesity epidemic. The program incorporates exercise elements and characters from the Kid Fitness public television series to get children exercising directly in the classroom while providing the teacher with the flexibility to use the program whenever they choose during the day. Each Fun Fitness Breaks kit contains:
 A large exercise poster featuring images of the Kid Fitness super health hero and his animal friends doing various sequential exercises.
 Large exercise flash cards depicting one of the Kid Fitness animal characters doing exercises that mimic their movements. The back of each card has a description for the teacher and on some age appropriate cognitive learning lessons.
 A DVD that the teacher can use for the children to follow along and an Audio CD that guides the kids step by step through the 7-minute ‘Fun Fitness Break’ using either the poster or flash cards as the visual guide.
 A teacher’s resource guide book.
 An exercise DVD designed for pre and after school programs.
“The goal of Kid Fitness is to effect behavioral change by providing a fun, interactive, and entertaining format that helps young children make their own healthy choices on physical activity and nutrition,” said Paul Neville, founder and CEO of Kid Fitness. “With childhood obesity reaching epidemic proportions in the United States I believe this partnership with the United Way of Chattanooga and our plan to bring the unique fitness program to every school district in the country will dramatically reduce the number of overweight children.”
About Kid Fitness, Inc. Founded in 2003, Kid Fitness, Inc. has developed comprehensive media based programs to assist young children in improving fitness and health. Specifically the Company’s exercise programs target a growing national health concern known as Child Obesity. The Company has a multi-year contract with American Public television, a national program distributor of PBS. Kid Fitness has just completed series 200, which consists of 13 episodes produced in high definition, and is now available in more than 82 million American households. Please visit the website at http://www.kidfitnesstv.com.
Nope, I haven’t yet…that’s why I made the point that I’d ‘reserve judgment’!!
My guess is it’s more DDR (Dance Dance Revolution) in terms of active engagement WITH media integration, which is great for using in rainy day classrooms or unsafe neighborhoods when outdoors is not an option…Let me be clear I’m not knocking it at all…
I simply find it a ‘snapshot’ of fascination in terms of how far fundraising has shifted from one realm to another, reinforcing the massiveness of the obesity problem, and desperation of all parties to come up with a viable solution.
I say ‘try anything’ see what sticks!! (though I admittedly prefer outdoor ‘free play’ like the Verb Yellowball campaign because of the very fact that kids were ‘not sure what to do with it’ when they were passed the ball…To me that’s a HUGE ‘uh-oh’ in terms of requiring MEDIA guidance from a talking head or cartoon character or active dance partner and speaks to a much bigger issue in terms of kids’ creativity being lost to ‘programming’—
It might be akin to using video games as teen gym allure fun/fitness integration w/media…(they’re popping up all over the place, using video, Wii style/interactives, cycling, rowing, snowboarding, etc. to entice kids into exercise!! Story on that to come!)
Glad to hear your kids are being impacted nutritionally as well…Excellent news! I’d like to hear more…ping me back and let’s chat on this further…maybe integrate some interviews with other parents using it to?? (believe me, I’d LOVE to focus on some SUCCESS stories!!!) 🙂
I chanced across this discussion and would like to tell the Kid Fitness story from the side of Kid Fitness. I am the producer of the show and also the president of Kid Fitness and so may be a little biased. However, Kid Fitness was created to help kids think about health and fitness. The show is interactive and encourages the kids to exercise right along with the characters. It also teaches healthy lifestyles and encourages fun, healthy snacks for kids. We recently developed a plan to provide the Kid Fitness “Fun Fitness Breaks” free of charge to schools across the country and we thought that instead of selling candy and cookies, perhaps selling videos with a healthy theme would be a better choice. Kids do love Kid Fitness and we hear all the time how much they enjoy exercising with the characters and even exercise when the TV is off. In addition they often ask “would Kid Fitness eat this?” We encourage the kids to exercise outside all the time and show them lots of fun things that they could be doing with their friends. TV is such a powerful medium, that we thought it should be used for good and childhood obesity has become such a massive problem with Diabetes is becoming epidemic. Kids need to be educated and made aware of the issues and solutions. Who better to do that job than a slightly goofy super health-hero and his many animal friends.
Thanks for the ping, appreciate the elaboration and am THRILLED to hear it’s more like a DDR or Wii/teen/gym/media integration…especially since some of the gaming/health care integration for fitness/nutrition is veering into sedentary turf…e.g. this new one I just noticed from KFHP:
The Amazing Food Detective
http://members.kaiserpermanente.org/redirects/landingpages/afd/
When I start working on the video game interactive fitness piece, would you like to be a part of the interview to share your outcomes/measures/best practices and such?
p.s. Ironically, I’m in Dallas right now at the American Heart Assn.’s strategic session brainstorming media engagement/re: kids heart health/fitness issues!! (probono, of course, but like I said, I want to help ANY way I can—kids are AT RISK for these “lifestyle cancers” (related article I wrote here)
https://shapingyouth.org/blog/?p=572
Appreciate your comments…
I would love to be a part of the interview. Just let me know when that happens. Good luck with your AHA work, it’s desperately needed. If you want to reach me directly, my email is fenton@kidfitnesstv.com
Excellent. Probably late Nov., realistically, as kids gear up for the winter months/holiday over-stuffing, sweet treat temptations and such.
If you haven’t heard from me before then, ping me here again (or use: amy at shapingyouth dot org) Also, I’m grappling w/how to best filter/handle copious quantities of e-mail without pulling my hair out, or losing impt. messages, so if you have any tips, producer to producer, pls. let me know! 😉 Meanwhile, good luck w/your efforts, and ditto, (as you said) ‘desperately needed!’ Best, –a.
Sounds good. I use 2 email addresses to identify which ones are the most important and use the delete button without fear. Look forward to talking soon.
I just produced a baby boomer fitness DVD series. I think the KidFitness Fundraiser is a great idea in general. How could it hurt? I found your site because I want to see if I can sell my dvds via fundraising. These responses gave me the confidence to go look for a partner. Anything is better than those gift-wrap things that I can never find when I need to wrap a present!
Yep, agree…I still need to do this feature follow up before the school season launches…meanwhile, HopeLab has some fabulous ideas in development along these lines in the fitness genre to get folks active. Check it out here:
http://www.hopelab.org/2008/03/17/winners-announced-in-hopelab%e2%80%99s-global-competition-to-get-kids-moving-press-release/
Or in my post here: https://shapingyouth.org/blog/?p=1243
The ‘iBlob’ looks pretty fun for all ages, actually 😉 –a.
My 2 daughters (age 6 and 3) and my son (age 1) LOVE KID FITNESS! We luckily recorded the episodes on our TIVO as our PBS station isn’t airing it right now. As soon as the program starts they are up on their feet and doing jumping jacks. They love ‘Noodle World’ and try to do all the exercises with the characters. I can tell they have been learning about nutrition as they tell me things about soda not being healthy and they are more interested in eating the healthy snacks that the characters are eating. It is a wonderful program. I need to find a PBS station that is airing it!
THRILLED to hear this, Caren…
The fiscal crisis has shifted the coverage queue a tad, but I still plan on running this feature assessing the use of various active media programs to get kids moving…And may even showcase/chat ’em up at the Network for a Healthy California Champions for Change event in the spring…am working on my abstract this weekend for a workshop, in fact…
Maybe Kid Fitness will be there? I know Kid Tribe was last year, and it was an awesome use of media with a hula hoops-hiphop mashup!
Cardio exercises with a sound workout program and a good nutrition program could be the greatest way to drop weight. Keep up the excellent work.