Exercise under pressure
However, cultural, social and other factors are cutting into the amount of time kids can spend being active, at school and at home.
Schools are devoting fewer hours in the day to physical activity, parents are increasingly worried about injuries, and fewer areas are being set aside as play spaces. Then there is the persistent attraction of screen-based technologies like television, smart phones and tablets that compete for a child’s time and attention.
The good news, says Fitzpatrick, is that providing tools for unstructured active play is relatively easy.
“Childhood obesity is obviously a combination of many factors,” she adds. “Some are genetic, some are psychological, some are within the family and some are in the community. But some of the environmental factors are easily modifiable: how much play equipment children have access to at school is something that’s easy to change, compared to air pollution, poverty or genetics.”
She also notes that investing in simple indoor play equipment like skateboards, hula-hoops, trampolines, unicycles, juggling pins, devil sticks and climbing walls could be highly cost-effective in offsetting long-term health problems.
“Indoor play might be linked to decreased weight but it might also be reducing stress levels in children,” she says. “It might have some other positive benefits that we haven’t examined yet.”
The Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada and the Fonds de recherche du Québec—Santé helped fund this study.
Read the full study here.