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K Eids Kids ages 8 to 10 spend about 51 ⁄2
KLMNO FRAZZ
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 2010 JEF MALLETT
TODAY: Partly cloudy
HIGH LOW 88 68
ILLUSTRATION BY LINDSEY STEGENGA, 9, FALLS CHURCH
hours a day listening to music, watching TV, playing computer and video games. For 11- to 14-year-olds, it’s 8 hours and 40 minutes!
More play, less PlayStation sTHE SCORE by Fred Bowen
increased from 43 minutes a day in 1999 to 2 hours and 42 minutes a day in 2009. Now, boys spend 16 to 18 hours a week playing video games. But don’t computer games count as
playing? They are called computer games, after all. Not really. Most computer games
ISTOCKPHOTO
national week of play starts Saturday. That’s a week in which communities and groups organize a Play Day where kids (and their parents) can play outdoors at a park, school play- ground or any open space. But wait a minute: Why do we need special play days? Don’t kids play enough already? The sad truth is that kids do not
A by Nia-Malika Henderson
When are the Obama daughters off- limits to the public? The answer, appar- ently, is that it depends. On a few occasions when outside in- terests have tried to co-opt the popu- larity of Sasha and Malia — such as when the Beanie Babies company sold dolls in their images, or when a group advocat- ing nutrition-policy reform made refer- ence to them on D.C. billboards — the White House has swiftly clamped down. And early last year, in a statement, a
spokeswoman for first lady Michelle Obama called it “inappropriate to use young, private citizens for marketing purposes.” But what if the marketing campaign is
President Obama’s new book? “Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daugh-
ters,” a 40-page picture book aimed at children ages 3 and older, is scheduled for release Nov. 16. The cover features an impressionistic painting of Malia, Sasha and first dog Bo. White House officials say the first daughters are marginal to the content. The book includes tributes to 13 “groundbreaking Americans and deals that have shaped our nation,” according to the book’s publishers. Among the 13 are Georgia O’Keeffe, Jackie Robinson, George Washington and Albert Einstein. Using the girls to sell the title — the second book in a $1.9 million deal for three books, only one of them for chil- dren, that Obama inked before becoming president — is not inconsistent with the policy of generally shielding the girls from public attention, the officials say. “I think our encouragement is to keep their private lives private,” press secre- tary Robert Gibbs said Wednesday. Sasha, 9, and Malia, 12, will not be doing any book promotion, he said. In an interview with Sirius XM radio this week, Obama said he was asked to write the book by publishers who thought he “might have something to say to young people.” The book was initially scheduled to come out in 2006 and ex- plore a portion of Obama’s childhood, ac- cording to a 2004 news release. The Obamas themselves have repeat- edly put the daughters in the spotlight. The book title borrows from an earlier bit of exposure: a Parade magazine cover story that ran a few days before Obama’s inauguration called “A Letter to My Daughters,” featuring their picture. The first lady has included both girls in her anti-childhood obesity and
play as much as they once did. A Uni- versity of Michigan study in 2000 found that kids had 12 fewer hours of free time a week than kids in the 1980s. Those 12 hours included eight fewer hours of unstructured play and outdoor activities. That’s important because lots of doctors say kids need to play to be healthy and happy. What are kids doing these days? Electronic media and lots of it. The
average kid spends almost 45 hours a week with TV, the Internet, movies and other electronic media. The popularity of video games is a
big factor. A recent study in the med- ical journal Pediatrics showed that video games are played in 90 percent of homes with kids ages 8 to 16. Still another report by the Kaiser Family Foundation this year found that time spent on video and computer games
just get kids to react to what’s on the screen and press buttons or move a stick so some computer image can chase a car or zap space aliens. Play is when kids, and not some microchip, make up the adventures. Play is when kids ride bikes or play ghosts in the graveyard and move more than their thumbs to make things happen. Kids also are spending twice as much time in organized sports and more than three hours a week watch- ing sports, the University of Michigan found. Although I love sports, that might be too much organized sports. So what should kids, their parents and coaches do to get more playtime? First, kids should spend far less time watching TV and playing computer games. That would give them much more time to play real games. Second, parents and coaches should set aside more of their team practices for free play. Coaches should make sure the kids, especially kids younger than 12, spend lots of time scrimmaging or playing games in- stead of just drilling skills. Maybe for some practices, coaches could let the kids pick the teams and make up the games. That part is trickier, I admit. I’ve coached more than 30 teams, and I can almost hear coaches asking, “How can kids learn to play without practic- ing their skills?” Kids need to practice, but they also need to play. This week and every week.
Fred Bowen writes KidsPost’s sports opinion column. To find a Play Day near you, go to
www.kaboom.org/playday.
ANIMAL NEWS
IRWIN FEDRIANSYAH/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Asia’s tiger population and habitat are shrinking fast.
Asian tigers become a rarer sight in the wild
Asia’s tiger population could be close to extinction, with fewer than 3,500 tigers remaining in the wild. The area where the ti- gers are found is less than 7 per- cent the size of their former range in Asia, a study published this week says. The scientists who did the re- search say tigers must be protect- ed from hunters and their habitat must be protected from logging if the animals are to survive.
G’night, mate: That bat
sounds Australian It’s not just people who have different accents. Bats develop di- alects depending on where they live. That finding can help scien- tists identify and protect species, according to Australian research- ers. They found that bats in for- ests along the coast of the state of New South Wales had different calls from bats elsewhere. Ac- cents have been found in other animals, but this is the first time they’ve been detected in bats.
Obama book raising concerns on spotlighting daughters
Neal Barnard, the group’s president. “I was very surprised to get a call from the White House lawyers saying that in no uncertain terms, I had to take the pic- tures down. I didn’t.” In May, Obama told a story about
Malia to demonstrate his attentiveness to the BP oil spill. “When I woke up this morning, and I’m shaving and Malia knocks on my bathroom door and she peeks in her head and she says: ‘Did you plug the hole yet, daddy?’ ” he said at a news conference. The line led the news and prompted a
column by Thomas Friedman in the New York Times calling for “Malia for Presi- dent.” Conservative broadcaster Glenn Beck then mocked her, criticizing her in- telligence. He later apologized, saying he had broken his own rule that children are off-limits.
Obama seemed to have a similar regret
after appearing with his wife and daugh- ters on “Access Hollywood” in July 2008. He later said that it was a mistake and that he wouldn’t have the girls sit for such an interview again. He has kept that promise, instead sharing details about the girls’ lives himself — including the fact that Malia scored a 73 on a science test, has grown to 5-foot-9, and had brac- es put on, “which is good, because, you know, she looks like a kid.” “She was getting, you know, she was
PABLO MARTINEZ MONSIVAIS/ASSOCIATED PRES
healthy eating campaign, often saying in speeches that an uptick in her daughters’ weight led her to serve more balanced meals. Obama, as a candidate, once told Parents magazine: “A couple of years ago — you’d never know it by looking at her now — Malia was getting a little chubby.” Yet when the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine tried to do the same thing with a school lunch cam- paign aimed at reforming the Child Nu- trition Act, a key priority for the first lady, they heard from the White House. The ad featured a young black girl with a thought bubble asking: “President Oba- ma’s daughters get healthy lunches. Why don’t I?” “When we did the ad, it didn’t mention their names, it didn’t show their photo- graphs and it was entirely positive,” said
OFF-LIMITS? President Obama, with daughters Malia, right, and Sasha, features them on the cover of his upcoming book.
“As they get older and more famous they become more of a commodity. You can’t say they are off-limits and then spoon-feed stories of
your own choosing.” — Doug Wead, author of “All the President’s Children,” on the Obama children
starting to look to old,” Obama said at an event in July. Historian Doug Wead said that, as they continue to put their daughters in the spotlight, the Obamas could find it hard- er to argue that they should not be writ- ten about. Wead said that “as they get older and more famous they become more of a commodity.” “You can’t say they are off-limits and then spoon-feed stories of your own choosing,” said Wead, author of “All the President’s Children.” Still, it is difficult for any presidential parent to fully separate the political from the personal, according to Letitia Bal- drige, who served as social secretary in the Kennedy administration. “I think every president has been
aware of the power of children. The Ken- nedys didn’t want the kids talked about at all, they clamped down on everything, but 14 months into the administration, if the children had a story, it came out,” Baldrige said. “The children were used as a public relations tool and all of a sudden it made the Kennedys very cozy and fam- ily-like. It was a whole new way of look- ing at them.”
hendersonn@washpost.com
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