Mental health researchers are increasingly alarmed over growing rates of inactivity among youth.

This trend toward young people cocooning in a digital environment poses many risks that can carry into adulthood. That's part of the reason behind this weekend's 2nd annual 'Sport for All Day', Wes Culp reports.

The Leisure and Cultural Services Department (LCSD) will kick off its 2nd annual "Sport for All Day" Sunday. Behind the program is the hope that the city's young people will get out, start participating in life and break out of their entrenched lifestyle of cocooning with their electronic gadgetry.

The sports program was started after a LCSD study found that more than 50 percent of Hong Kong's citizens do not maintain basic healthy activity levels. Young people especially are targeted for the program, as increasing amounts of research reveal that physical and mental health in adulthood is largely dependent on childhood activity.

Mental health researchers who are alarmed over potentially serious social consequences of cocooning among children are discovering strategies to break what they believe to be a dangerous trend leading to social problems in adulthood. The LCSD hopes that their sponsored events can be a part of the plan to get adolescents back on the right track.

"We promote events like this to help the physical and mental growth of young people so that they can learn to live a healthy adult life in the long run," said Cam Lok, the Chief Leisure Manager for the LCSD. "I think that if the physical condition is improved, mentally they will be improved as well. We promote social skills just as much as exercise."

Sedentary lifestyles among young people raise concern because inactivity during youth lays the groundwork for a lot of future problems. A family research study by the Chinese University in 2002 found that when Hong Kong children are in their homes they are either lying or sitting over 70 percent of the time and engaging in physical activities only 10 percent of the time. The propensity for kids to sit around like lumps of earth has prompted some to observe kids are starting to look like boulders.

The obesity rate among young people is skyrocketing. A study by the Baptist University in 2006 showed that 15 percent of Hong Kong children are deemed by the medical community to have become overweight at unsafe levels, a staggering five times the estimated 3.3 percent of children who were obese among developing Asian countries in 1995.

Parents who expect the schools to pick up the slack shouldn't hold their breath. Hong Kong schools offer an average of two physically active classes a week, well below the average of five classes a week in the United States, a country with its own obesity problems. The lack of physical education contributes to conditions leaving young adults unprepared to create stable and effective exercise regiments later in life.

"I feel better than someone who doesn't work out at all, but I don't think I'm in good enough shape," said Eva Li, a 22-year-old recent graduate of the University of Hong Kong. Li has taken it upon herself to swim twice a week to help manage her figure. Although she is by no means obese, she still feels like she is fighting just to break even in her battle against the bulge. "I am really just trying to be fit," she said.

Nearly a third of university student responders to an online survey by the University of Hong Kong in 2007 said they suffer from depression and almost half have anxiety issues. For a growing segment of the adolescent population which already has self-esteem and anxiety issues, the tendency to becoming socially alienated is exacerbated in an environment in which kids willfully shut themselves off from the surrounding world.

"If they are spending 10 hours online and missing sleep they have to realize that what they are doing isn't healthy," said Alice Yu, who has been working as a counselor for over 15 years, the last six years at the ReSource counseling center. "We have to help them recognize the things they are compensating for. Are they trying to feel like a winner or superior to their friends? We find out the psychological function of the addiction and then give them skills to replace the addiction."

As inactivity becomes prevalent in a person's life, so does self-esteem suffer. This often leads to increased isolation and anxiety that affect a person well into adulthood. The easy social escape that technology provides can give young people a vehicle through which they may feel successful and connected, even as they become increasingly alienated from the real world.

"For young people, it is all about achievements in their life. It could be within their circle of friends, their jobs or receiving love in their family. These are where the concrete problems start," said Yu.

Yu says that people who have a hard time achieving acceptance often avoid anxiety-inducing physical situations and instead take solace in isolated digital activities. "They don't have to smile or even talk if they don't want to. It isn't real and they don't have to be real if they don't want to be, or they can express the emotions that they would never reveal otherwise. It can become an addiction because it is so gratifying to their unattended needs."

"They often have lots of problems to confront, such as bullies, academics, bad relationships with their parents. When they face these problems they use the Internet as an escape," said Joseph Hung, who is director of the addiction counseling center for the Hong Kong Christian Service. "They can play online games for weeks just so they can feel like they are achieving something."

Jung suggests that in order to arrest this problem, authority figures need to step up early in a child's development to make sure they are developing healthy habits. The Hong Kong Christian Service is just one of many organizations that have trained professionals that can help children develop healthy stress management skills.

"We want to give them a happy experience outside of the Internet," said Jung. "We mostly use teachers, parents and social workers to step in and create contact with the children. They need to be played with, they need to be happy and they need to know that they are loved."

(HK Edition 08/06/2010 page8)