Thank you.
Rod, thank you for reminding us what health really is: the mind, the body, and the spirt, and how integrated all of those things are. We often talk about teaching the whole child in our school system, and what you've shared is very beautiful.
I want to address the question of fear and how our communities have changed. It's a complex question. It's really one about social change and how we can impact our communities to make a positive social change and begin to trust one another. I think it really is a matter of increasing our comfort zones slowly, because it has taken a long time to get where we are today, from a place where certainly I, as a child, was left to my own devices until dinner time. I had dinner and couldn't wait to go outside again until the street lights came on. That was the sign we had to come in. So things have changed a lot in 20 to 25 years.
“Play in the park” is an idea we promote, and I have observed what happens when communities start something like “play in the park”, where they're working together to supervise a local park. People come together and start to get to know their neighbours. They start to engage in conversation, and the kinds of conversations that certainly happened in my community.... The first day we did it, we had six children out. Now we're regularly getting about thirty children coming to play in the park, and their families come. But kids have also starting walking to school, because now we know who lives in what house and the kids have developed a further connection. Six-year-olds now know ten-year-olds in the same school because they play in the park together.
So I think it's a slow social change. I think the starting point is creating open community spaces where people can come together in a way that is maybe initiated by the community but is supported by governments' and cities' free open space, where the doors are open for people to come. They can then use their initiatives to actually come together in that space.
So I don't think I can snap my fingers and say to just let your kids out, but I do think that by starting a discussion, like we are today and like the one you've been engaged in for some time now, around the health of our children.... Twenty years ago, we didn't wear seat belts and we didn't sit in car seats, but we've somehow gotten to a place where we wouldn't think about putting our children in the car without a child seat. I drag my child seat right across the country to oma and opa's house, in order to put my children in a car seat.
Physical activity has to be such a priority for us as parents, as teachers, and as community leaders that we wouldn't think of supporting a government that didn't make it a priority, that we wouldn't think of supporting a school that didn't have an integrated physical education approach. That is going to take a little bit of time. It takes our talking about it, discussing it, and continuing to promote and take seriously the critical piece that physical activity has in our physical, emotional, and social health.