Cooler weather outside makes playing outside as a family easier for longer periods of time. Open Streets in Lawton is hoping to encourage families to go outside and give them ideas on how they can play together.
Sandy Foster, the program director for Comanche County Memorial Hospital’s Healthy Living TSET program, says spending time outside is essential for children’s health.
“If you don’t have health, you don’t have wealth,” Foster said. “It’s really important for our kids to be healthy.”
Overall, kids’ health is not good in Oklahoma.
“We’re ranked 46th to 48th, depending on what study you look at for overweight kids, and we don’t want that,” she said. “We don’t want our kids to then turn into overweight adults. All of the diseases that go along with cardiovascular disease, diabetes, we’re seeing kids younger and younger that are being diagnosed with type two diabetes.”
They’re hoping to help improve those numbers through events like Open Streets. She said around the time they started Open Streets, the hospital was also doing another program where they focused on getting fourth graders active. Foster said one of the kids they were helping was 240 pounds.
“We’re trying to address it early enough that they’ll find a love and it’s a life-long fitness – something they love doing – being outside and again getting off that technology that’s important, but it’s really important for your health that you are physically active,” Foster said.
She said the free event, excluding the food vendors, will have an activity for kids to do and a block filled with bounce houses.
“We’re going to have a whole block of inflatables,” Foster said. “Everything from your littlest to older kids that will have some of the obstacle courses that they do with inflatables, but that is going to be a whole block, and then we’re going to do some cooking demonstrations, and we’ve got all of the stuff that you typically see at open streets.”
Open Streets is happening on September 20 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on C Avenue from 2nd to 5th Street in downtown Lawton.
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