Preschoolers More Likely to Sit Around Than Run Around at School
New York Times | Motherlobe | KJ DELL’ANTONIA | MAY 27, 2015To learn more about how preschoolers spend their day, University of Washington researchers monitored the activities of 98 children attending 10 preschools in Seattle. The scientists spent an average of seven hours a day for at least four days at each school. They tracked the amount of time children were given for active play, and students were equipped with accelerometers — wearable devices that measure movement — as a way to gauge the children’s level of physical activity during play time.
The study showed that most of the time children were in preschool, they were not given the opportunity for active play either indoors or outdoors. Even when they were given play opportunities, much of the activity was sedentary. Over all, children did not have the opportunity for active play for more than six hours of the school day. Just under two of those hours were spent in nap time, but during another 4.5 hours a day when the children were awake, they did not have an opportunity for active play. On average, only about 48 minutes in a child’s day — about 12 percent of the time he or she spent in child care — were set aside for active play time.
The accelerometer data showed that children were more active when allowed to play on their own outside than when teachers led the activity indoors. Over all, the accelerometer data showed that the children were sedentary during about 70 percent of their day. The findings were published in the journal Pediatrics.
“Kids are naturally inclined towards physical activity,” said Dr. Pooja Tandon, the study’s lead investigator, a member of the Center for Child Health, Behavior and Development at Seattle Children’s Research Institute and an assistant professor at the University of Washington. “But we have to give them the opportunity to be active in the places where they already are.”
Compared to the recommended 120 minutes per day of physically active time for children at this age, the average of 48 minutes per day during which children had even the opportunity for active play is “considerably suboptimal,” the researchers wrote.
