Are Electric Scooters For Kids A Good Idea?
Search for the term “electric scooters for kids” online, and you'll find hundreds of different kinds of scooters kids can ride on without doing anything but starting them up. Looking at them, I couldn't help but wonder what happened to the exercise of pushing a scooter yourself the way we did it when I was a child. With all of the news reports telling of the excessive obesity rate in children these days, it couldn't help but make me wonder if buying electric scooters for our kids is a good thing.
No matter whether they call them hoverboards, trail rippers, or go-peds, the bottom line is all the same. Instead of our children riding their bikes or pushing their scooters manually, we're giving them the ability to ride wherever they want to go without doing any of the work. Electric scooters give kids the thrill of riding at 20 mph, which is a lot faster than they can walk or manually operate a riding toy. If you were a child and had to run to the store for Mom, which would you pick? Your bicycle which means pedaling up hills under your own power, or your electric scooter which will zoom you to and from with no effort at all? I think the answer is pretty obvious.
Children in our society today participate in far too little active play. We all know that many of them spend most of their free time sitting in front of a TV screen playing video games. Even with the advent of the Wii, which encourages kids to get up and get moving, there are still a lot of sedentary kids in our society. While children used to spend most of their time outside playing, they have become couch potatoes, and everything we give them that discourages active play, such as electric scooters, is doing them another disservice and teaching them bad habits that will carry over into adulthood.
There are times when an electric scooter might be a good idea. If a busy student athlete, for instance, needs a faster way to run his paper route, an electric model might stand him in good stead. After all, he's already getting plenty of exercise while practicing for the team, so it won't hurt a thing to give him a little assistance with his job. However, if the child basically leads a sedentary life, an electric scooter isn't going to be the right choice.
When I was a kid, I had a neighbor boy who was just my own age. I never saw him, however, because he spent all of his non-school hours in his house. He had been a chubby little boy, and he grew into a huge teenager that everyone made fun of. The only time I ever saw him moving was when he'd chug up the street on the fancy bicycle his parents had bought for him. He never left home, and he continued to get larger and larger. Last year he passed away at the early age of 57. I imagine the only exercise he'd ever gotten in his life was on those occasions when he rode his bike. If he'd have had an electric scooter, he'd have spent an entire lifetime of inactivity.
You can buy your child an electric scooter as long as you're willing to supervise its use and enforce rules for other types of active play. I'm sure it would make a fun toy for any child, but he or she is also going to need plenty of playtime in other, more physical pursuits.
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