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The fact that Canada scores a dismal D when it comes to producing active, healthy kids should come as no surprise.

The constant stream of stories about childhood obesity has largely inured us to the notion that we are producing a generation of tubby tots.

Still, the new report card that was released last week by Active Healthy Kids Canada serves as a useful reminder of where we have gone so terribly wrong.

Canadian children -- citizens of one of the wealthiest (in every sense of the word) countries on Earth -- have succumbed to a dreadful combination of sloth and malnutrition (in the form of too many calories, not too few).

But let's not blame the kids. They are born athletes: squirming little bundles of joy at birth, soon crawling, walking and running -- until we beat it out of them.

Children's lives today are highly structured, and most of that structure involves sitting. We sit them in classrooms all day, and then we sit them down again at night to do homework. And, in between, there are occasional breaks for transportation (sitting in the car or bus) and leisure (invariably sitting in front of a TV or a computer screen).

In short, children are overweight and obese, in large part because they have few opportunities to be physically active. We have engineered activity out of their lives and, in the process, engineered chronic illnesses such as heart disease and diabetes into their lives.

Children need to be moderately or vigorously active for at least 90 minutes daily for healthy growth and development, according to Canada's physical activity guidelines.

But only 43 per cent of children meet that minimum standard. Girls are consistently less active than boys and, come adolescence, the gender gap becomes even more pronounced.

More troubling still is that parents are woefully -- and perhaps willfully -- ignorant of this reality. Close to 90 per cent of parents think their own children are sufficiently active.

"No one ever says their kids are the problem," says Dr. Mark Tremblay, the chair of Active Healthy Kids Canada. "There's a real disconnect. A lot of parents are in denial."

So let's be clear: It's not somebody else's problem.

Children, the inactive, overweight lot that they are, are merely following in their parents footsteps.

Three in every five Canadian adults are overweight or obese. Only one in three adults engages in moderate or vigorous physical activity on a regular basis -- the equivalent of a brisk 30-minute walk daily.

In other words, parents are poor role models.

The most alarming element of the new report card, however, is one that garnered little attention in the media coverage.

Active Healthy Kids Canada revealed that one-third of parents rarely or never play active games or sports with their children. And one-third of children rarely or never engage in unstructured play.

Sure people are busy. Everyone suffers from so-called time poverty.

But if you rarely or never have time to play with your kids, there is something fundamentally wrong with your priorities, and your life. If children can find two hours or more a day to watch TV, but no time to play, there is something terribly wrong with their lifestyle.

Parents today lavish their children with expensive baubles -- Game Boys, iPods, snowboards and so on. Some sign them up for expensive organized sports but, again, we learn that fewer than half actually attend games or practices.

There is nothing as precious as making a bit of time to play tag, toss a football around, or to embarrass yourself trying to skip double Dutch.

Silken Laumann, the former Olympic rower, makes that point eloquently in her delightful new book entitled Child's Play: Rediscovering the Joy of Play in Our Families and Communities.

She urges parents to lace up the runners and get out there with their kids. Doing so is a lot more important than catching up on e-mail or unwinding in front of the TV after a hard day at the office.

For their part, Active Healthy Kids Canada makes three principal recommendations in the report card:

Step away from the screen and replace TV and computer time with physical activity;

Establish quality, school-based daily physical activity programs;

Inform Canadian parents and caregivers about the importance of unstructured physical activity and play.

It's not enough to entertain, educate and medicate our children. We have to let them play. We have to let kids be kids.

When they are, they won't be inactive, and they won't be obese.

André Picard is a former board member of Active Healthy Kids Canada, but did not play a role in the creation of the report card.