[quote=FlyerInHi]BG, corporations get to kids when they are healthy. Just watch European TV (or travel). Over there, teenagers and millenials are skinny and look younger. Over here, our kids are pudgy. There are social and scientific reasons for that . . . . [/quote]Uhh, yeah. The fact that a frap at Starbucks (typical “after-school snack”) has 500-1000 calories, depending on size, isn’t helping these kids. And curly fries at Carl’s Jr and all the other fast food offerings today (incl bags of “Takis” from the corner grocery store) did not exist when I was growing up. Nor could we get an extra $5-$20 day to spend on junk food until our parent(s) got home from work. (I was lucky if I got 35 cents in the morning to buy a school lunch or if there was even the “right” groceries in my house to pack a sack lunch in the mornings when I was in HS :-0) When we came home from school in the afternoons, we snacked on carrot and celery sticks, peanut butter and saltine crackers and NONE of us were overweight, ever. Of course, we played outside after doing homework instead of sitting around texting on iphones the rest of the day.

[quote=no_such_reality]The real problem is the expectations for long hours, sedentary work, minimal vacation and coupled with greater demands for out of school activities to counter the stripped schools and an out of whack food system where 80% of the food in the grocery store is engineered to push our biological triggers and a subsidies system that makes the worst food for us the most affordable…[/quote]

I think today’s workforce is required to put in LESS facetime at their jobs that we or our parents had to when raising a family. It is now common to telecommute one or more days per week. Also, “sick leave” has now been combined with annual leave in a lot of workplaces so the worker doesn’t have to have a “legitimate excuse” to call in sick and thus has more workdays to take off to do what they need to do with no questions asked. And a parent now has so much more choice in the grocery store to choose from to feed their families. If they “choose” to buy junk food, they had other choices at the store but consciously “chose” what they chose to buy there.

I agree that over the last 15 years, especially, that the public school curriculum in CA has been stripped (of mainly art, music and PE classes). But your kid can still avail themselves of extracurricular music and sports in the public school system. Although these after-school activities do cost a little (instrument rental, bus fare for transport to games, competitions, uniform accessories, etc) a parent today doesn’t have to “pay extra” for “private” programs. My kids’ HS had multiple AP offerings and even an IB program but they weren’t interested in them but did participate in music and athletic extra-curricular activities. If your kid takes advantage of the AP offerings their HS offers and tests out of them, this will give them a HUGE leg up to get accepted into university.

Besides possibly paying a few hundred for a 6-8 week SAT study group led by a professional in the field, I see no reason to spend Big Bucks on other “academic enrichment” courses if your kid’s HS has at least 6 AP offerings. I also don’t see the need to spend Big Bucks on private HS if the public HS in your kid’s attendance area is rated at least an “8” and the money spent on private HS will come from the kid’s proposed college fund. We all know that HS is what you make it, regardless if other students in your kid’s HS drop out. A parent spending Big Bucks on grades 1-8 for “academic enrichment” is also wasting money if that money should have been directed to the kid’s college fund, instead, IMO. (No one really knows how much college will cost 6-12 years from now.)

I repeat that College Admissions Boards DON’T CARE ONE IOTA about anything that happened before 9th grade!

I also feel that homeschooled HS “graduates” (who never set foot inside a public or private HS) are at a disadvantage during the CA public university application process because there is no real “proof” that the applicant actually met the A-G entrance requirements, or more importantly, that whichever family member (parent?) “taught” them over the years was actually competent or ever even graduated from HS themselves! It’s akin to the fox watching the henhouse. I’ve seen some amazingly ignorant non-HS graduates attempt to “homeschool” their MS and HS kids and I feel so sorry for those kids that they are not allowed to join their neighborhood pals down at their local public school due to their closed-minded parent(s) irrational “fears.” I have the highest regard for public school teachers, especially in CA where the standards to obtain a public school teaching credential are very rigorous compared to other states.

Anyway, it seems to me that NSR is just making excuses here why today’s parents are so “rushed” in their daily lives that they feel they must “succumb” to grocery-store marketing tactics to buy convenience food and junk food to feed their families.

How about taking 3-4 hours on Sunday afternoon to cook up more nutritious meals and freeze in portions to serve during the week? That’s what I used to do and I worked FT during the week. (With two people, this might only take 2-2.5 hrs.)