My father is one of the lucky ones. He was diagnosed with prostate cancer and lives to tell the tale. It seems most people have had someone close to them be diagnosed with cancer and it’s definitely not a ‘it won’t happen to me’ scenario as it’s just all too common now.
No longer can you just be a bystander to this diagnosis, if we can all help each other and ourselves with understanding early diagnosis and taking precautionary measures the more lives we can save.
“In New Zealand, prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men. About 2,500 new cases of prostate cancer are diagnosed each year.” (http://www.prostate.org.nz/) ‘Men’ are husbands, fathers and grandfathers who affect even the youngest generation. It is Blue September 2010 (Prostate Cancer Awareness month) and it seems many men have a dislike for acknowledging that something isn’t quite right or if they do acknowledge it they don’t want to act on it. It’s often up to those around them to push them to go to the Doctor and get a check up.
Now you may wonder what this has to do with us at Little Kickers and preschool football?
A study (‘NIH-AARP Diet and Health Study’) carried out over 6 years shows clearly that overweight and obese men are more likely to die from prostate cancer than men of normal weight, though no more likely to actually develop the disease.
Little Kickers is about starting that all important task of introducing daily movement as a lifestyle behaviour and if this can be done through the beautiful game of football (soccer) that they love to play than that’s even better.
The importance of being active comes with it the recognition of keeping healthy and awareness of your body in a positive way (even at their young age). We start off getting children to enjoy being active. We keep our sessions light hearted and fun without putting undue pressure on succeeding at what they are doing. We support your child’s effort whether their ‘big kick’ off the sandcastle (aka coloured marker) was actually a small kick or they missed it completely. It doesn’t matter to us, we’ll get them to keep trying and give them plenty of high fives along the way. Their enjoyment at the sessions is the most important thing.
By introducing the love of sports into their lives we hope to instil the love of healthy living which leads to a healthier lifestyle. This in turn leads to a healthier family environment and generations of healthy families.
If we can start this process at pre-school age we are more likely to succeed.
More information about Prostate Cancer and Blue September:
http://www.prostate.org.nz
http://blueseptember.org.nz/index.php
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