Youth health data

According to the latest disclosed data from the 2023 National Student Physical and Health Survey, my country's adolescent morphological development indicators have steadily improved for 20 consecutive years. The average height of 18-year-old males and females has reached 175.7cm and 163.5cm respectively, ranking among the highest in East Asia.； However, the three core risk indicators of myopia rate, overweight and obesity rate, and psychological problem detection rate are still at high levels, and the differences in health stratification among adolescents from different regions and family backgrounds are continuing to widen.

A while ago, I followed a friend from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to a junior high school in the suburbs of Shanghai for sampling screening. Among the 45 children in the second grade class, 37 wore frame glasses, and two had taken off their glasses and could not see clearly the multiple-choice question options on the blackboard. They secretly wore OK glasses to hide from daily inspections. As soon as the bell rang, the canteen was half full. Among the children holding iced Cokes and stuffing fried skewers into their mouths, there were seven or eight whose sizes were obviously beyond the normal range for their age. In the drawer of the school doctor's office, there are several herbal tea bags for sleeping that were left by the third-year junior high school students. There was a little girl who lost 10th place in her grade in the last mock test. She only slept 3 hours a day for two weeks in a row. She didn't dare to tell her parents, so she secretly asked the school doctor for medicine to relieve her headache.

Don't tell me, the dazzling height data is really not false. Nowadays, walking on the campus of middle and high schools, there are a lot of boys over 180cm, and girls around 170cm are also very common. On average, they are more than 2 centimeters taller than children of the same age ten years ago. Many parents' investment in height has indeed paid off. But if you squat in front of the school and observe for half an hour, you can easily find that behind these beautiful growth curves, there are many hidden worries that have been ignored.

Regarding the reasons why the myopia rate remains high, the opinions of practitioners in different fields are quite different: most front-line class teachers complain that it is because of academic pressure. They have to study hundreds of sets of papers when they are promoted from primary school to junior high school. Children are doing homework even during breaks. How can they have time to look up at the sky?； Internet practitioners feel that it is too easy to get addicted to short videos and mobile games. Many children can play with their mobile phones for more than ten hours during the holidays, and their eyes cannot rest at all. ； Researchers in the field of public health are more inclined to believe that insufficient outdoor activity time is the core cause - the WHO recommends that teenagers should be exposed to more than 2 hours of outdoor time every day. However, according to our survey data, less than 15% of children can meet the standard. Many schools are afraid of safety accidents among students, and even the running and vaulting events in physical education classes have been cancelled. At most, children are allowed to take a walk on the playground.

Now the overweight and obesity rate among teenagers aged 6-17 has reached 19%, and almost one in every five children is overweight. Some people think that junk food is all responsible, and that the milk tea shop and fried skewers stall in front of the school should be mainly responsible. ； Some nutritionists also say that the feeding concept of many elders is still at the stage of "being able to eat is a blessing", and it is too common to rush to feed children and stuff high-calorie snacks for their children. When I was doing research in Yantai, Shandong Province last year, I met a grandmother who stuffed her sixth-grade grandson with two fried chicken drumsticks as an afternoon snack every day. At the age of 12, the child already weighed 160 pounds. He gasped after running two steps, and his blood pressure had reached the critical value of hypertension for adults. The grandmother even cheerfully said, "If you get fatter and stronger, you will become taller in the future."

The most controversial thing is mental health data. The current depression detection rate among teenagers aged 14-18 is 17.5%, of which severe depression accounts for 4%. When someone saw this data, their first reaction was, "Today's children are just too delicate. Why did we have so many psychological problems when we were young?"” ； There are also front-line teachers who feel that the current competitive environment is too fierce. Starting from kindergarten, they have to compete for school districts and specialties, and children do not even have a chance to breathe. ； On the contrary, doctors who work as child psychiatrists feel that the rising data is not necessarily a bad thing - in the past, many children's emotional problems were dismissed as "rebellion" and "ignorance". Now that everyone's understanding of mental health has improved, it is possible for more problems to be seen and intervened.

What deserves more attention are the stratified differences behind the data. The overweight and obesity rate among urban children is 5 percentage points higher than that among rural children, but the anemia rate among rural children is twice that of urban children. ； The myopia rate of migrant children and left-behind children is nearly 10 percentage points lower than that of children with urban household registration, but the malnutrition rate is three times that of local children, and the detection rate of psychological problems is also 7 percentage points higher. Last month, I was doing research at a primary school in a mountainous area in Sichuan and Chongqing. I also saw that several 10-year-old children were almost 10 centimeters shorter than their peers. When I asked them, I found out that the adults in the family had gone out to work. The old people usually cooked white rice with pickles, and rarely even ate eggs.

After five years of research on adolescent health, my biggest feeling is that there is no one-size-fits-all solution. You cannot ask children in mountainous areas to eat one pound of vegetables and half a pound of fruits every day like children in first-tier cities, nor can you ask high school students facing the college entrance examination to spare 2 hours a day for outdoor exercise. Now many places have begun to create exclusive health portraits for each child. Targeted intervention will be carried out whenever an indicator turns red: some schools have replaced in-class eye exercises with 10 minutes of outdoor long-distance walking. After one semester, the myopia rate has dropped by 3 percentage points. ； Some counties regularly distribute nutritional packages to left-behind children. In half a year, the average height of the children has increased by 2 centimeters. ； Some high schools offer a parent-child psychology class once a week to discuss children's emotional problems in advance, so there is no need to wait until something goes wrong to remedy the situation.

To be honest, if we stare at these cold data and calculate over and over again, it will eventually fall on every living child. After all, the rise and fall of data are just numbers on the report, but the health of children is a lifelong matter.