Malaysians like molasses
Do you
agree that an active lifestyle starts with family activities? How active is your family? Is it more difficult to be active as one
gets older? Is it more difficult now as
compared to the past? Or has exercising
become too trendy? How do you think
Malaysia compares to Slovakia? Are
Slovaks (and Slovak families) active?
This article deals with the issue which can be discussed in every modern western country, not only in Malaysia. The lack of sport activity is a concern of almost all modern families. According to me, people need to realize the necessity of physical activity. If we want to be not only physically healthy but also mentally fit, the sport needs to be an essential part of our lives. As is mentioned in the article, it’s important to develop children’s fancy for sports in early ages. This can lead to an active engagement in sports also in older ages. This happens because of forming of a personality in early ages in childhood and so when children are involved in sport activities they consider it later as a natural part of their lives. This is the reason, why also I will try to make my children practice some kind of sport. However, you need to take into consideration the age of a child. As is mentioned in the article, Lawyers Thong’s and his wife’s children are in the age of 11 and 9. In these ages, they can consider climbing with their parents as interesting way of spending their weekends. However, when they reach the starting phase of adolescence, their values and priorities can be changed. They realize that the party with friends is much more attractive than spending a weekend with parents and this can be a source of the decline in their physical activity. However, parents can also solve this problem by not forcing their children to spend weekends with them, but make them attend any sport club or team. What I wanted to say is that it’s a good way to motivate children to spend their free time actively by common sportive weekends, but at certain age this needs to be reduced because of different children interests. This is the case of mine. When I was young I spend each weekend with my parents on bicycles and when I reached the beginning phase of adolescence, I started playing basketball and I had enough time to enjoy parties during weekends. Nowadays, I am disappointed with myself, because my physical activity has been eliminated because of IB. However, I hope I start to do my best in sport during my undergraduate studies.
ReplyDeleteYou do make several good points throughout your comment, I agree with your most of your opinions, in fact, I could actually relate to some of them. However, I do not believe that “developing affection for sports in early ages” is really a proper way of making a child create an attachment to sports. I consider the creation of affection for sports to be highly dependent on the actual individual and for this reason I believe that everyone differs at which age he/she develops this affection. I also find it important for a child to create this affection naturally, which brings me to think that forcing it in anyway would in fact cause more harm than good.
DeleteI believe that a child should have the freedom of playing with toys for a certain period of his/her early life, in order for him/her to explore and find out what entertains them. Many sports are just complicated versions of simple games; this brings me to a conclusion that if a child creates a liking towards a certain toy or game, then it is quite possible that in a matter of time he/she will incline toward the more complicated “sportified” version of it.
Andrej, you will be such a benevolent parent. As you said the affection for sports depends on actual individual. Let me ask you, do you believe in existentialism? As it states, the personality of individual is created by its own actions and decisions. I think, you mentioned similar thing in your comment. However, do you think that children in early age can act on its own, decide on its own and know what he/she likes? In my opinion, children only explore the world. They do not know what they like since they haven't experience a lot. This is the reason why parents are those who need to provide different opportunities to children. They should guide children on the path of understanding.
DeleteAccording to me, parent's role is to motivate a child to do a sport and yes, sometimes also force him to do so. It's absolutely natural that a child would like to stay home and play video-games rather than go and play basketball. I do not want to deprive children of playing such games, I just want to allocate their time effective. It means, yes you can play that game, but you also need to be active and attend come sport training. According to your comment, you would let your children play that games and believe that in certain age he/she will realize the importance of sport. I think, this is bad. Children have quite lots of free time, since they are not burdened much by school duties. They have enough time to do a sport and also play with friends. I am talking from my own experience. I played basketball for 6 years, and there were days when I just didn’t want to go to the training. I wanted to play a game instead. However, my mum always “forced” me to go to the training. It wasn’t forcing like: “You need to go there you little goblin!” She always explained me to go there and then play the game. And this is a kind of forcing, but human forcing I would say.
Sport is really important for children and adults as well. It makes us more relax, more calm and less aggressive. Nowadays, there’s much bigger pressure of society upon children in terms of TVs, computers, Apples and stuff like that. However, we can’t forget on our natural base. That’s why the sport is so important. Since children are not aware of this fact, it’s parent’s role to explain and show it to them. Children can’t be just left behind and let them do what they want to. Sometimes, the force is needed.
When I was younger my mother always took my siblings and I for mini-adventures: whole days in the park and zoo, visiting my grandparent’s house in the Slovak countryside, and to other places where we could just run around and escape the claustrophobic apartment which we lived in. When we got a bit older and all of us were attending school in the U.S, we all joined sports teams; both my brother and I played for basketball and soccer teams while one of my sisters did gymnastics and the other played for the school tennis team. Even then in the evening my parents would spend time with us on the soccer field and tennis courts. We would often go on whole-day biking trips during the weekends to Washington D.C. or Mt. Vernon. I remember one winter when it snowed a lot we went cross-country skiing on the large football field of a nearby high school.
ReplyDeleteNow that we are all older and it is usually just my parents and I at home, we still try to maintain an active lifestyle. We all go to the sports center twice a week and I also play tennis two to three times a week. I also live near Horsky Park, so when my brother’s here we go running in it. Although it’s not as much exercise as I would want to do, and I feel my stamina is much worse than three years ago, I still feel that it is enough to keep me fit.
The point I’m trying to make is that I completely agree with the article. If my parents hadn’t been so active themselves, I probably never would have loved sports as much as I do now. In fact, if I do not have tennis practice or serious training at least once a week, I feel myself getting weaker and unable to concentrate on daily activities and school work. Exercise is like a charger to my body. Although right after practice I do feel exhausted, when I get home I’m already feeling more energetic.
It might be just my laziness speaking and, like Brian Wong states, I might be making excuses, but I really do believe that the opportunities to exercise in Slovakia are much lower than in the U.S. Even though Slovakia does probably have the same amount of paid sports facilities, in the U.S. there were a lot more free ones. I particularly liked the fact that schools in the area where I lived had their own vast sports grounds comprising of tennis courts, soccer fields, basketball courts, athletics tracks and baseball pitches, all available for the students as well as the public. To me it seems that here all of these things are ridiculously expensive, which limits people in their activities. Of course, we do have the parks and some bicycle trails, but the amount that we have cannot even be compared to that of the U.K., where parks are about as frequent as pigeons.
It might be just because when I was younger I wasn’t as observant, but I also think that in general people have become more attentive to maintaining an active lifestyle in the past decade. Maybe it’s a just desperate step taken by many because of the surge in the amount of people that are diagnosed with some disease/disorder in the last few years, but I feel I see more people jogging in the evenings or going to the gym. I don’t think the reason for exercising matters, be it to lose weight or check out women or men in the fitness or gain muscle so you feel cooler, it’s the fact that you do it that is important.
I agree with almost everything Jana said. My story is very much the same, and I can confirm what you said about sports in Slovakia from my own experience. When coming back to Slovakia after living 8 years abroad, one of the huge differences that I disliked the most was how little sports are supported in this country, even less in my school. Perhaps this has something to do with the school being very academic and putting sport and physical fitness behind more “useful” skills such as math. In comparison to the school I attended in Italy, the opportunities that you get here for carrying out sport are absolutely miserable. When I think about it that probably stems from the lack of interest from the students’ side. Why there is this lack of sportive enthusiasm is the question. The reason there isn’t any motivation is the bad equipment and the resulting bad opportunities for sport create demotivation, forming a vicious circle. What Jana noted, about the costly-ness of sport here, is undoubtedly true, and it never fails to surprise me how many people go for the free alternatives, such as hiking and running. Whatever time of day I go for a run; in my part of town I always meet some fellow jogger or cyclist. This leads me to believe that in general, Slovaks are not a lazy people; they just don’t have the money, time and historical cultural setting for sport. The problem could, therefore, easily be solved if some money was poured into the building of football pitches, running tracks and if sport facilities and centers lowered their prices. For me, it is difficult to compare the current situation with the past, because I have no idea what the country looked like 10 years ago, although I don’t think that the increase (I think there has been one) of sporting people can be attributed not to illnesses and doctors tips, more to humankind’s newly acquired willingness to get healthy and stay healthy.
DeleteI absolutely agree that active lifestyle begins with family activities. However, I think that family activities affect children in the family mainly in the early childhood, when the kids are not allowed to go out alone yet. Later when they become older and “big enough” to go out alone with their friends they start to be influenced by them too. In addition, when talking about the earlier childhood, family activities are in my opinion very useful. It keeps the family together and also helps the body fitness. Children tend to do what their parents do, so it is really important to provide them this kind of activities which they will follow. Many things are about getting used to something, and I suppose that being physically active is also the case. If children will get used to active lifestyle in the early childhood, it is most probable that it will stay with them in the later years as well.
ReplyDeleteIf I look back at my early childhood, I remember that my family also used to go out pretty much. We had most of our activities during weekends, because they were the most adequate for longer trips or any other physical activities. During the week, my mum usually took me for dancing, and not surprisingly, dancing stayed with me till now. Later, my parents taught me how to cycle or to roller-skate and we started to have these kinds of activities. We used to go out to the nearby parks, not just for cycling, but also for long walks. Even though, many people say that walks are a bit waste of time, our family doesn’t share this opinion because regular walking has also many health benefits like reducing the risks of diabetes, heart disease, depression or even strengthens the bones, which is not usually common among people. Nowadays, we still go out cycling or for long walks, but unfortunately less often, though we still enjoy activities together really much.
Even if it is sad to say, I think that it is really more difficult to stay active when getting older. As children grow up, their responsibilities in school, at home and in any other activities increase and become harder. During high school or college students have obviously less time for physical activities because these activities are considered to be less important than their priorities as school and their studies. However, even later in life, the past students become adults who start working in different positions which sometimes require most of their time and there isn’t much free time left. Obviously, relax and sleep is also very important so many people spend their free time in such way. There are also many exceptions, which do not leave out physical activities from their life even in this stage, which is in my opinion really colossal.
ReplyDeletePhysical activities then start appearing, when having own children, but again only for a limited period of time. It will reduce when getting to late elderly years, when the body won’t be able to keep active as much as it was before. It is more or less in my opinion a cycle which is affected mainly in the early years by the parents. I also share the idea that it is more difficult to stay active now than in the past because today’s technologies like computers, various play station games or computer games just provoke younger children not to keep active. Many children stay at home watching TV, or chatting with their friends on facebook with a huge bowl full of crisps or ice-cream. Obviously, leading to increased obesity, which is nowadays not surprisingly popular. However, there are also many exceptions among us who choose the other option of keeping our body active, which is also the healthier option. There are also many boys these days, who go regularly to gyms to perform exercises for their muscles. Too much of it is though not healthy too.
Malaysia has in my opinion similar problems as Slovakia. These countries both suffer from children who are not active, people who say that they will exercise in their free time which they don’t have or other similar cases. However, I think that there are both types of families, active and not active families in both, Malaysia and Slovakia. It is individual, so it is hard to say whether Slovakian families are or are not active. In my surrounding, I know more families which are active than not active which is very pleasing. On the contrary, others may have different experience.
In my opinion it is very good when a family leads a healthy life style. Healthy life style and exercise in general is very important for our body. I really support the idea of these family trips. It is good for many reasons; firstly, you are much healthier when you spend more time on the fresh air, secondly, it helps to strengthen the family. It is lovely to spend some time with your family and especially these kinds of activities help to strengthen the relationship.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I see it on my family. As I grow older I have more things I need to do and therefore it is much harder to find some time for your family. I also think that technology makes people lazier and careless. People can always find an excuse why to be lazy and technology is a very good excuse. When I am at home, I spend most of the time on the internet. It is mainly because I need to do school stuff, but often I just waste time on the internet, without realizing it.
I agree that leading a healthy life style is a matter of habit, discipline and determination. I also agree with Thong Weng Hon that parents play a really important role in inculcating healthy habits in their children. When you learn something when you are young you usually continue doing it for the rest of your life because you have been raised with the feeling that it is the right thing to do. Parents are usually the ones who provide these options for their children.
I definitely agree that an active lifestyle starts with the family activities. My family is not as active as we could be. It is also very important to be more active as you get older, because as people get older, they become lazier and sooner or later they start to get bored. In addition older people have worse health than younger people, so it is even more important for them to start doing something. Therefore you should start with a healthy lifestyle as soon as possible so you will not get into the state of doing completely nothing, just watching TV. I do not think that Slovak families are being very active, but it always depends on individuals. There are families who are active, go together to see a movie or to a theatre, visit museums or castles or just do trips to other cities. It is not a matter of time, but a matter of will. I certainly think that if people would want to leave a healthy life style they would find time for it.