Sources close to the discussions at Nickelodeon, the children’s TV network, say the broadcaster is considering a group of “Explorer Girls” who would appeal to older children.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1047997/How-going-make-woman-Dora-Explorer.html

I think “failure to thrive” isn’t a fair characterisation, though. My niece went from a chubby toddler to a willowy seven-year-old in little over two years, not because she has gotten narrower, but because she grown much taller.

Groan. My daughter and her best friend (a boy) loved Dora when they were preschoolers–annoying repetitive songs, squeaky voice, and all, it was still about having active outdoor adventures and solving problems by being observant, always using a map and a little Spanish. Glad they aged out of it before Dora started having “recipe adventures.”

At what point is this? How do we quantify one group over another?

If we’re talking about a children’s group where we try to teach the kids something other than “being fastest is the mostest,” I’d think one of the things you want to teach them is that it’s good to help others, even when that means not every athletic event or outing is a chance to display one’s Personal Best. Sometimes we slow down to help people who can’t keep up.

In the “After” list, I would add “makeup”. Urrgh.

If you aren’t willing to slow down for the slow kids, then don’t act aghast when they drop out and penalize them with long,elaborate commments about the evils of sedentariness.

I’m hoping I can respond to the general theme contained in your comment, without you taking personal offense. i should start with the caveat that personally this obviously was hard for you.

But generally, there’s obviously going to be a cutoff with anything taht tries to be inclusive, or that tries to be NCLB (apply the acronym to anything else you want). And at some point the losses felt by the group who has to “walk more slowly” exceed the losses felt by the group who can’t keep up.

When i’ve been in the slow group, i’ve wished for more inclusiveness. But when i’ve been in the fast group, i’ve chafed at the bit, and hated the limitations and stodgy progress of the slow folks. I really do think there are two sides to this. And if wishes came true, i’d usually rather wish for the slow kids to speed up, than for the fast ones to slow down.

You know, I had coordination problems as a kid. I was active and took a lot of dance, but I just sucked at it — far below the normal curve. I didn’t really get the intuition about body that most people have very young until I was twelve or thirteen.

A lot of people didn’t want to have to “walk slow” to deal with me, so that was fine — I just ducked out of all sports and group physical activities as soon as I could. Great anti-sedentery message, this not walking slowly.

Important Moral Development Lesson: sometimes you slow down in order to help other people catch up, so next time you can all walk together. It’s not very Gordon Gekko, but there you are.

I still don’t get how you looked at Dora and got “fat”.

And this relates to this post and the issue of the new, starved Dora doll how? Are you suggesting that Dora the cartoon image is a hindrance whereas Dora the emaciated doll is a help wrt getting kids to be in shape when they show up for the first time at Boy Scouts? This is, admittedly, an absurd reading of your comment, but I can’t think of any other way that your comment could relate to the subject of the post.

I run into a lot of issues where parents bring their kids to the Troop to get them off their duffs and get them physically active. These kids are usually quite inactive elsewhere in their lives. My particular Troop is quite active; we go camping almost every month (regardless of the weather - we’ve camped in -5 F (-20 C) and 95F ( 35 C) and in thunderstorms). So when a fairly inactive kid comes into our Troop and is faced with a bunch of kids who are headed off to go rock climbing one month and canoeing the next, the question is how to get the kid participating in our program. Some of it is that the kid has problems keeping up even though he’s willing, some of it is that the kid is disinclined to be active - his life has been going pretty smoothly without having to be active up to this point and he’s not thrilled about the whole “be outdoors all day, sleep in a sleeping bag on the ground, move around a lot, be away from phone/computer/video games/TV and eat my own cooking and not have unlimited access to pop and snack food” deal. But we aren’t a big enough Troop that we can run multiple activities a month, one for the more active kids and one for the less active ones.

So, then, let me ask this; a kid and his Mom (yeah, I know, stereotype again, but 85% of the kids walking into our door for the first time are with Mom, not Dad and not both) walk into a meeting. “Can I sign my son up?” “Sure, here’s what we do, here’s the application, here’s some guidelines on how we operate, here’s a list of gear (but we can loan him a bunch of stuff for a while).” However, the son is, say, about 40 pounds (18 Kg) overweight. In 3 weeks we are going rock climbing, and he’ll have to climb up a bunch of rocks like a rough staircase about 400 ft/120m up to get to where we actually tie off to ropes and climb and rappel, and there’s no other way to get up there. Four weeks after that we are going to go on an orienteering course that is tramping through the woods, on trails about 1/2 the time and off trail the rest for about 3 miles/5 Km. How would you all recommend that we help the kid with this? Sometimes we have a group of kids who go at a slower pace, but not always. We always stress that “It’s not a race, the idea is to do the best you can, every part of this has value of it’s own.” We’ll have an adult stay with a kid that’s having problems keeping up, but there have to be at least two kids or two adults as Youth Protection (and common sense) says that a kid can’t be alone in the woods with someone not his parent/guardian. It’s not always easy to find the extra couple of adults. We don’t always have a kid who wants to be slowed down staying behind with the kid who’s having problems keeping up. Suggestions?

I guess Cindy Crawford during her height ‘0 fame period must appear morbidly obese to folks who think Dora is chubby and fat.

I can’t believe how often I listen to people and say, “Wow.”

(And as a cartoonist, I’m bewildered as to why the character design on Diego is so tepid and uncharming, in comparison to the character design on Dora.)