Parents will be issued with instruction manuals showing them how to teach traditional playground games such as hopscotch, skipping and hide-and-seek to their children in a new move to tackle soaring levels of obesity among young people.
All mothers and fathers of newborn babies would be given a detailed guide to nurturing their child's physical development under plans being considered by the government's main agency for promoting sport and healthy activity in England.
The manuals would contain scores of ideas about how parents can help their offspring avoid becoming overweight by regularly playing simple games with them at home, in the garden and even when travelling by car.
Several such schemes are already operating in parts of Scotland and Wales, and the quango Sport England is set to approve soon a number of pilot programmes to assess whether they can halt the rise in childhood obesity, which the government has just made a key objective.
Fife pioneered the approach through its Play At Home scheme in 1999. Each year 4,000 babies are born in the region and, within days, parents receive a manual from a health visitor who encourages them to use the wide range of games and pastimes depicted in order to help develop their child's 'physical literacy'.
'It's not rocket science, and a lot of it is things previous generations would have done without thinking. But while I don't want to sound demeaning to present-day parents, a lot of parents today haven't been taught particular games or nursery rhymes and so don't know how to pass those on to their children or do them with them,' said David Maiden, the PE and youth sport manager with Fife Council.
The Play At Home manuals remind parents how to do everything from ring-a-ring-o'-roses to peek-a-boo to the hokey cokey. Parents receive further books, containing new exercises more suited to older children's development, when their son or daughter turns three and five.
Fife Council sent out around 10,000 manuals to parents of newborns, three-year-olds and five-year-olds last year. The scheme costs only £75,000 a year to run.
'We are trying to encourage the parents to be the child's first teacher. We want them to be physically active with the kid - and more physically active themselves,' said Maiden. 'For example, we tell them that when a child is making its first attempt to climb onto a settee to help them rather than discourage them, and to get the child to focus its eyes and learn to reach out and grab things - all easy-to-do activities that will hopefully get the child into good habits early on.'
The Office of National Statistics recently reported that physical exercise among the young was declining and the proportion of children spending less than an hour a week on sport has risen from 5 per cent to 18 per cent.
Supporters say advising parents in this way is a useful way to help to combat the growing number of children whose waistlines expand from eating junk food, watching television and doing little or no physical activity.
Poor sports provision at school and many parents' busy lifestyles mean the amount of time they spend playing with their children is declining, reducing the amount of regular exercise their offspring get.
But the initiative is likely to spark claims that ministers are resorting to 'nanny state politics' by giving parents such detailed guidance about how to bring up their child.
Many of the children in Fife whose parents began receiving manuals in 1999 start at primary school next month. 'We can't say for sure that Play At Home will have had certain effects on them, but we hope it'll be kids who are more physically active and more physically skilled than previous generations', admitted Maiden.
Sport England have held discussions with Atlantic Sports management and Training, the company which licenses the manuals, which have been used in Hamilton, New Zealand, since 1990.
'The interest for us in Play At Home is that levels of childhood obesity are rising rapidly and this would help us to address that, because if children were fitter and more active they would obviously be less obese,' said Ian Fytche, the organisation's strategy director. 'More young people clearly need to develop the basic skills of balance, mobility and co-ordination.'
Research for Fife Council, which operates Play At Home with the local primary healthcare trust, suggests that over 80 per cent of parents use the manuals in the first 18 months of a child's life. However, usage declines after that.
Maiden admits that, while most parents in Fife have been very positive, there is 'a hard core, perhaps around 10 per cent, who aren't interested. They are the ones who are more likely to be inactive and overweight themselves. Our health visitors are working with some families like that.'
