If you looked into the same child's room thirty or forty years ago you would have probably found baby dolls, toy trucks and probably even some books. You would have found the neighborhood children outside playing in the kickball or hide and seek in the yard. Children played outside from sun up to sun down. The playing of these physical activities outside has unfortunately been replaced by the inactive high tech toys of today. The kick ball and hide and seek games of thirty years ago have now been replaced with games being played on the Play Station, Xbox or Wii. It is estimated that children in the United States are spending at least twenty five percent of their waking hours watching television and statistically children who watch the most hours of television have the highest incidence of obesity. .
If you take another look inside the house of 30 years ago you would find a dad who went to work every day and a mom who stayed home to tend to the household duties and the children. With the rising cost of our day to day living expenses in America, most homes now must have both dad and mom working full time to make ends meet. Over the last two decades there has been an increase in the number of dual income families as more women have entered the workforce and more women become the sole supporter for their single parent family. This new way of living has caused American children to eat whatever is convenient for mom or dad to fix or for some children to eat whatever is easiest for them to fix for themselves. Constraints on time has made working parents rely more heavily on prepared, processed, and fast foods, which are generally high calorie, high fat, and low in nutritional content. Usually these "easy" meals come in greasy bags from fast food establishments or in plastic wrappers within a frozen cardboard box and have to be cooked in the microwave before eating. In some homes the stove never even gets warm from preparing a meal more than once a week.