My sister and I were talking about a sad situation she was witnessing with her nieces and nephews. It seems they are, and probably still are, glued to their devices and even when a parent comes over to tell them to take a shower or some mundane thing like that, they will ignore the exhortations and resist tooth and nail from being pried away. When the badgering continues unabated and they finally acquiesce, they will go to the bathroom, shut the door and stay in there ostensibly taking the shower but instead staying on the device. For hours.

My daughter says that regrettably many young people are being raised by social media and her opinion (she has a master’s degree in Psych) is that the misbehavior of young people is not going to improve but only get worse.

My sister witnesses that the children are thin and have no muscle tone. That made me think about when I was in elementary school at Woodbury in Marshalltown, Iowa. We’re in 4^th or 5^th grade and we are trundled down to the gym where we were made to do calisthenics to the tune of “Chicken Fat” sung by Robert Preston. It’s indelibly etched in my mind. “Go, you chicken fat, go!”

The President’s Council on Youth Fitness was started in 1956 by President Eisenhower because of alarm over poor youth fitness levels compared to European children. Can you imagine President Trump doing something like this?

Anyway, whoever was in charge of the calisthenics didn’t do a very good job because at some point I tried standing on my head. Yes, I went upside down and tried to balance without benefit of hands and wrenched my neck very badly. My neck still bothers me, and I can’t attempt a yoga handstand.

We were all so very active in those days. We walked to school. We were only driven if the weather was really bad. We participated in gym glass or swimming lessons. We didn’t have anything to watch except for the TV which was invariably commandeered by dad so the only time we could indulge was early Saturday morning when the folks were hard asleep in the other room. When my dad was watching golf, I’d sit on the couch absentmindedly eating raw carrots until he would chase me out of the room because the crunching was too loud.

Chicken fat song link