CHILDREN in Bolton just don't know how they are supposed to behave.

Everyone knows a child's place these days is sitting staring at some kind of electronic game.

How many times must they have heard that youngsters today don't do enough sport?

For goodness sake, the Government last week announced a big campaign to get more people playing sport in the run-up to the 2012 London Olympics.

But do kids in Bolton pay any attention to the country's apparent apathy among children towards sport?

Not a chance. They're too busy outside playing sport.

Not that all kids these days are clean-living and healthy, but there's enough youthful activity out there to make me wonder if the town is bucking the national trend.

Last week on the sports pages we ran a story about a new football club in Highfield, Farnworth, which is having to expand from two teams to five because the local kids are flooding to play organised football.

Have they never heard of Game Boy thingies and Wii wotsits?

And this week, the focus fell on Little Lever, where the village football club has been inundated with under-10s turning up for open training sessions, so much so that staff have had to call on another four of their coaches to help with training.

The problem there is that if adults don't come forward to run two teams next season, the kids won't be able to play football.

These figures are just the tip of the enormous iceberg that is junior sport in Bolton.

An all-time high of 5,000 kids are currently playing competitive football every weekend in Bolton, with the figure confidently expected to rise to 8,000 in the next few years.

In athletics, Bolton and Horwich Harriers are enjoying record junior membership, and the 28 cricket clubs in the town's two thriving leagues all have junior teams in four age groups, playing in midweek leagues.

In contrast, the number of Bolton's adult football leagues has gone down from five to two in the last eight years and the number of adults playing some other sports has dwindled.

It makes you wonder what they're doing.

My guess is either organising junior sport or complaining about kids not playing as much sport as they used to.