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Climate change is an added barrier to youth physical activity, report
says
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Photo: The Canadian Press
Siblings Ella Pringle and Aidan Ridley play baseball at a park in a
handout photo as part of their parents' "conscious" effort to get them
out of the house and away from their screens for regular exercise as
recommended in a ParticipAction report. THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO
Heat waves and poor air quality from wildfires pose extra challenges
to children and youth who need more exercise outside and less time
staring at screens, a new report says.
ParticipAction's latest report card, released Tuesday, gives Canada's
kids a D+ for overall physical activity. It found that 39 per cent of
children between the ages of five and 17 met the recommendation of 60
minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise a day.
The letter grade is a slight improvement from a D in 2022, when
COVID-19 pandemic restrictions meant kids lost out on organized sports
and school activities.
The non-profit, which ranks children's fitness levels every two years
using mostly Statistics Canada surveys, found that 31 per cent of
girls met the physical activity recommendations compared to 57 per
cent of boys.
Promoting physical activity among five- to 17-year-olds "is like
swimming against the current" because screens keep them sedentary
indoors when they could be benefiting from free play and activities
outdoors, said lead researcher Mark Tremblay.
"It's a very tough aspiration in the world in which we live right now,
where the built environment is one that is more conducive to being
indoors and inactive," said Tremblay, who is also a senior scientist
withan obesity research group at the Children's Hospital of Eastern
Ontario Research Institute in Ottawa.
The report card says heat waves and smoke-filled air lead to
cancellations of sports activities and recess, which can make kids
more sedentary.
However, while the increasing impact of climate change means kids -
especially those with asthma - should switch to indoor activities,
those can be too expensive for many families, Tremblay said.
Chris Ridley and Melanie Pringle of Delta, B.C., south of Vancouver,
said they prioritize physical activity for their eight-year-old son
Aidan Ridley and his 16-year-old sister Ella Pringle.
"We consciously try to get them out," Pringle said beside a field
where their kids were trying out a couple of baseball bats.
While both kids get about 35 minutes of exercisea daywalking to and
from school, Aidan plays baseball in a local league and Ella is on the
rugby team at school.
But the annual cost of rugby is $400, which is slashed to $250 if
parents volunteer - something that Pringle can do only because her job
involves shift work, she said.
"Volunteering during school hours, that's very hard for families," she
said.
When the air quality worsens due to wildfires, the family heads to an
indoor pool at a community centre that offers free admission just for
high schoolers but Pringle said that should also be the case for
elementary students. The ParticipAction report recommends that
physical activity be promoted early in life.
There aren't enough local recreational facilities, which get crowded
and charge too much for everything from swimming lessons to skating in
the winter, Ridley said.
If the family wants to skate together, the cost can be nearly $30 each
time, limiting how often they can participate each week, he said.
"The biggest problem is that kids don't play together," said Ridley,
adding that's another downside of addictive devices that keep kids
connected electronically while they miss out on physical activity and
socializing - just by getting out of the house.
Dr. Melissa Lem, a family doctor and president of the Canadian
Association of Physicians for the Environment, said that while climate
change can make it challenging for kids to get outside, that should
otherwise be the goal because nature provides both physical and mental
health benefits.
"We know that exercise outdoors supercharges positive effects. It
drops your blood pressure more, it improves your self-esteem more, and
we know that's an issue, especially among adolescents and kids," she
said from Vancouver.
Lem said about 900,000 Canadians have received a "nature prescription"
to visit a park or just get outside as part of a program launched by
the BC Parks Foundation in November 2020 before it was initiated in
every province by June 2022.
Any regulated health professional, including nurses, psychologists and
occupational therapists, can participate inthe program. Patients get a
customized nature prescription file, and the standard "dose"
recommends they spend at least two hours in nature each week, at least
20 minutes at a time.
"The most common pediatric patient I would write a nature prescription
for is a kid who gets a lot of screen time and is having mental health
or behavioural issues and maybe socially connecting less with other
kids," Lem said. "Most often, it would be a prescription for time
outdoors, to spend time with friends outside instead of inside on
their phone on their screen."
The report card gave Canada's kidsa D- for active play and found that
22 per cent of children and youth spent an average of more than two
hours a day engaged in indoor and outdoor unstructured play —
something the Canadian Paediatric Society encouraged in its new
recommendations earlier this year as part of "risky play" to benefit
kids' physical and mental well-being.
Children and youth got a D in sedentary behaviour because 27 per cent
of them met the recreational screen time limit of no more than two
hours a day. That's up from an F given in 2022.
They got a much better grade of B- for sleep, with the finding that 65
per cent of children and youth met age-specific recommendations for
the amount of sleep they got: nine to 11 hours every night for five -
to 13-year-olds and eight to 10 hours for those aged 14 to 17.
Only four per cent of five- to 17-year-olds met the combined 24-hour
movement guidelines when it came to physical activity, sedentary
behaviour and sleep, earning them an F — the same as in 2022.
_Canadian Press health coverage receives support through a partnership
with the Canadian Medical Association. CP is solely responsible for
this content._
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