A Stitch in Haste

...or is it?

Adding weights to children's toys may help them improve their fitness during playtime, the results of a small study suggest.

"This study provides one intervention to the current trend of declining fitness in America's youth," Dr. John C. Ozmun, of Indiana State University and his co-authors write.
...
Their study included five boys and five girls, who were an average of 7.5 years old, who were randomly assigned to carry either large, cardboard toy blocks that weighed less than a quarter of a pound or blocks that weighed about 3.4 pounds.

You don't know whether to laugh or cry. Sure, if a Lego piece weighed as much as a bowling ball, then kids might gain quite a bit of upper body strength -- not to mention a few hernias -- playing with them.

You can devise your own twists -- "Embrace the Absurdity," "The Politics of the Warm Fuzzy Feeling" and "My Tax Dollars Pay for Studies Like This?" come to mind.

I'm going for Curtain #1 -- Embrace the Absurdity. Did anyone bother to think about the economics of heavy toys? I don't have kids (due to my stunted soul), but I have a dog, so I do know something about toys. And one of the things I know is that big, heavy toys are more expensive than little lightweight toys. It's almost as if the material inputs that go into a product affect its price. Someone should look into that.

If childhood obesity has a disparate impact on the poor, then perhaps the solution should not be to make their toys more expensive. Just a thought.