I think it is lack of PE in schools and the paranoid communities that make it seem like there is a pedophilic kidnapper on every street so people don't allow their kids to have free play anymore. I used to leave the house in the morning and not come back till sundown, I never hear of kids doing that anymore, just taking off on their bikes and coming back for dinner.

Now the parents have to play with the kids, the kids aren't allowed to explore any longer and are trapped inside and then yes, we have parents that refuse to tell their kids to get off MySpace and make some real friends and let them sit infront of the playstation or whatever game system for hours and hours. And yes it is cruel to place it all on moms like dads don't have any say in the food in their homes or in raising their kids.

But also I was recently on an MSN board where many of the woman couldn't help but claim that their vaginas made them better cooks, childrearers and housekeepers than their lazy husband who don't help. Well I wouldn't help those self congratulatory beyotches either.

Then sure we have the parents that use too much packaged foods instead of meal planning for the week on the weekends.

When did economists and statisticians become such media whores?

between childhood obesity and greater maternal employment in the workplace. I suspect that having a parent at home to prepare and monitor what kids eat has a lot to do with the quality of their diets. But what's true for moms is true as well for dads. If they took primary care of children, they could do the same food prep. The study should have phrased its conclusion in terms that included both parents. That would be a more accurate description of who has responsibility for what kids eat.

I agree that kids being kept inside contributes to the obesity problem. When one kid is kidnapped in a far away state, the media goes nuts over it and children hundres of miles away lose a bit more of their freedom. Organized afterschool sports, such as soccer, seems to be taking the place of free play. Perhaps more supervised large-group activities would be best, though without the wins/losses being tracked so as to reduce competitiveness and make it easier for heavier kids to participate without them feeling that they've let their teams down.

I don't think more PE would help. I remember PE being in the middle of the school day, so most of us didn't really exert ourselves. A class period was 45 minutes, we were given 5 minutes to change clothes after gym class. Maybe the boys were able to shower and change in that time, but we girls certainly couldn't. Moving PE to the last class period might have helped.

Also, community-sponsored events for families to participate in together, such as mini-marathons or walkathons might be good.

I have the rarest of the rare, an at-home job that allows me to quit by 3:00 p.m. each day. And I have school age kids. One would think they would have unfettered free play time.

But I can tell you, the free play that my kids get ain't what I got. I was unsupervised. I rode my bike all over the neighborhood. I had an afternoon paper route in the fourth grade. I sold Girl Scout cookies on foot, on my own. I rode my bike to dance and piano lessons. I hunted for tadpoles in a stream. My brother and I generally did our own thing after school until dinner time.

If I let my elementary school children have the freedoms I had, I'd probably have some well-meaning parent calling the Child Services Division on me for child endangerment. Kids just don't run around on their own until about middle school or so, and I'm in a very safe suburb. If they ride their bikes in the street, I'm right there with them. I don't necessarily like it, it feels smothering to me some days. But it's the way it is. It's what's expected of me as a parent. I don't think there's a bogeyman around every corner, I think my neighborhood is safe and my neighbors are good people. But kids where I live always seem to have some hovering mom or dad right there, watching every move.

I'm quite the maverick in my neighborhood for letting my son walk home from a friend's (three blocks away, and he's in the third grade), and it always involves a flurry of phone calls back and forth from the other parent to me. "He's leaving now." "He's home now." So everyone knows he's safe.

It's very hard to have unstructured free play in that environment.

We have trouble fielding 6 teams per age bracket in a county of almost a half million people. And trust me most of the kids who do play are not obese. No the problem is not working moms it's that people in general are lazy ass slugs who can't get motivated to get their fat asses off the couch. Parent and child alike. And when those kids grow up they will be lazy fat assed adults. Here's what you need to do. You need to make physical activity a REQUIREMENT for children. More PE and more after school programs. Anything - hiking, ball, boxing, gymnastics, swimming, soccer, dance anything but gear it towards fitness not the ubercompetitive bullshit that goes for play now.

Otherwise everyone will look like the squishy sickly slugs in Raleigh NC, the BBQ king of the south.

As the number of poor households increases, and the number of single-parent households increases, the number of children with no supervision other than that of their mothers will increase - or are those trends that have not been observed? Employment may be up, but household income is not. Fathers may have as much right to be the single parent as mothers - but she's generally the one who gets the children in a divorce - assuming a marriage was ever involved in the first place. The published findings and conclusions strike me as being pretty reasonable and worthy of attention - yeah, right, THAT could happen...