I'm so unsurprised by the latest report over on the BBC News entitled Children need even more exercise, in which they suggest that modern children watch too much TV, play too many video games, and generally get far less exercise than they should.

Their bold suggestion, well, the bold suggestion of researchers in the prestigious journal Lancet, is that children should get at least 90 minutes of exercise each day.

This must be some ritual of summer that I don't remember from when I was a kid, but is there something about the temperature, the humidity, the lack of classrooms that causes children to lose their listening?

Not their hearing, I'm sure they can hear just fine. It's whether they actually process what they hear, whether it sinks in or not.

If you have children I bet you know what I'm talking about. It's as if their 'listening ears' have been left at school, tucked neatly into a desk, never to be pulled out until September rolls around.

I realize that we're an outlier in the entire TV and media discussion because we don't watch any TV at all. That's right. When they're deathly sick we might okay a video once in a blue moon, but I estimate that our three children, ages 2, 6, 9, watch less than twenty hours of TV/movies annually, and zero video or computer games.

Usually when I tell people that they gasp and act uncomfortable, immediately trotting out rather daft rationalizations for why the hour or two of daily TV their own children watch is educational, important, valuable or otherwise important. I mean, we wouldn't want our six year old to miss an episode of American Idol, would we?

Frankly, being a no media family works really well for us. Our kids are active, sporty, creative and artistic, and always seem to find things to fill the time, whether it's bicycling, skateboarding, playing on the swings, drawing, reading books, or finding neighborhood kids to play with. It works for us. This doesn't mean, however, that I think it can work for all families.

With that said, it was darn interesting to read the latest statistics from the recent Kaiser Family Foundation's research entitled The Media Family. According to that study (as reported by David Kiley in BusinessWeek)...

This is just so disturbing on a number of levels: McNeil Consumer Healthcare has released a new version of its popular Children's Tylenol pain reliever that includes a set of flavor packets that let children produce the flavor they'd prefer for the medicine. One Web site reports that the package includes 'a bag full of tiny packets filled with powdered 'crystals' representing four different flavors: Strawberry, green apple, bubble gum and chocolate.' [src]

On one level, it's not a bad idea since most medicine tends to either taste yechy or is cloyingly sweet and syrupy, but what bothers me is that any time you make medicine seem more like candy, surprise, children think that it is candy.

This is the problem we have with our children and cough drops: all of them are only partially convinced when we say 'they're medicine, not candy', and the baby is sure we're lying because, heck, they're so yummy.

Have you looked at cough drops recently? Sure enough, they're now packaged and flavored as if they were hard candy, not medicine. I'm not talking about the menthol and eucalyptus flavors that us big folk might prefer when we're feeling a bit under the weather, but flavors like orange, black cherry, cherry, and 'tropical fruit'.

Heck, Hall's popular line of cough drops includes mint, ginger-grapefruit, strawberry, blueberry and even their 'Fruitables' line that they proudly describe as 'liquid-centre soothing candies with real fruit juice'. Sounds good, doesn't it?

Linda and I were in Target this afternoon and were appalled to see children's shirts with slogans like 'Cuter than you' and 'Isn't it cute that you think I'm listening'. These go along with jewelry that proudly proclaims the wearer is a 'bitch' and similar.

Here's what I don't get, though: who the heck buys this kind of thing for their children?

There's a mean spiritedness in these slogans and many modern items of clothing that just escapes me.