Youth health content

It is never a simple matter of "not getting sick, meeting sports standards, and doing well", but a dynamic balance of physical health, mental health, and social adaptability. There is no standardized plan suitable for all children. Any health requirements that are divorced from individual growth scenarios are essentially anti-health.

I met Xiaoyu, a 14-year-old boy in the second grade of junior high school, when I was working on a youth health intervention project in the community last year. In order to improve his score in the physical education high school entrance examination, his mother forced him to run 3 kilometers every day. At the same time, he also signed up for three extracurricular cram schools. He didn't even have time to sleep in on weekends. It wasn't until last month's physical examination that he fainted on the playground mid-run. He was sent to the hospital and found to have not only iron deficiency anemia but also mild anxiety. His mother still clutched the physical examination report and told the doctor, "I'm doing this for his own good. Young people don't have so many emotional problems."

This type of cognitive bias is actually quite common. Most researchers in the field of public health will first emphasize the bottom line of physiological basis: National Health Commission's 2023 survey data shows that the overall myopia rate among my country's adolescents is 53.6%, more than 60% of primary and secondary school students do less than 1 hour of moderate to high-intensity exercise every day, and nearly 40% of students do not sleep up to the national standard every day. The decline of these hard indicators is indeed a problem on the table, so many schools implement health check-ins and compulsory recess sports, which are essentially making up for shortcomings in this area.

But what is interesting is that researchers in the school of educational psychology are very controversial about such "forced health" measures. Among the 1,200 youth questionnaires our project team collected last year, 37% of the children passed all physical examinations, but said that they "often feel weak and don't want to do anything." There are also many children who get up in the middle of the night and hold their mobile phones in order to make up for the number of exercise steps required by the school. This was originally a health requirement, but it has become a new source of stress. A survey conducted by the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences the year before last also showed that the depression detection rate among teenagers aged 14-18 was 17.5%. More than half of the emotional problems were initially dismissed by parents as "rebellion" and "hypocrisy" - just like the girl in the first grade of junior high school who dared not go to school for half a month because she had three acne on her face. Her mother still said that "the most important thing for students is to study, what's the use of caring about looks", and did not realize that there was a problem with the child's social adaptation.

You may think, is that completely free-range? Neither. I have seen many parents who go to the other extreme and regard "respecting their children's wishes" as a reason to give up. Their children watch short videos until two in the morning every day and eat fried chicken and Coke without interfering. It is called "happy education". In the end, the children not only grow slower than their peers, but are even afraid of normal communication with others. In fact, when we say there is no standardized plan, it does not mean that there is no bottom line: no smoking or drinking, no staying up past 12 o'clock for a week, and the courage to ask for help when encountering school bullying. These red lines must be kept, and the remaining space can be flexibly adjusted.

After working in this business for a long time, I always feel that the health of teenagers is actually a bit like raising succulents. You cannot water the plants at a fixed amount every day and get enough sun at a fixed time. If you apply uniform standards, it will easily lead to root rot. We have previously implemented a "targetless exercise time" in pilot schools, leaving 40 minutes every afternoon between school and evening self-study. Teachers are not allowed to assign tasks, and parents are not forced to practice test items. Children can play ball if they want to, and chat with classmates if they want to squat on the roadside, even if they are squatting there to watch ants move. After one semester, statistics show that not only did the students' average physical test scores increase by 4 points, but the anxiety scores on the psychological scale dropped by 12%, which is much better than the previous force-running exercises for everyone.

In fact, many times we adults complicate "youth health" and insist on breaking it down into individual indicators. Instead, we forget the true nature of health. There is no need to require your child to run a few kilometers a day or drink eight glasses of water. As long as he is willing to tell you a few more interesting things about the class today, is not picky when eating, does not fall asleep all the time in class, and when encountering difficulties, his first reaction is to ask you for help instead of holding it in, he is actually on the track of health. After all, we are raising living children, not standard products on the assembly line. How can there be any identical health template?