When I encounter toddlers and pre-school aged children I am often very overwhelmed by the amount of activity and movement that is going on around my knees (and also by the increase in noise). These kids move… they like to move… and in some cases they like to move loudly.
However, are they moving enough? We know that children in school are definitely not active enough. According to the Canadian Health Measures Survey (direct measure using Accelerometers) only 14% of boys (aged 6-10) and 7% of girls (aged 6-10) are meeting the Canadian Physical Activity Guidelines.
So what about the younger kids, the noisy ankle biters, are they active enough? Well to answer that we need:
- Guidelines or recommendations on how active they “should” be…
- Statistics /research that has measured whether these guidelines are being met in this age group.
I decided to do some investigating to see if I could answer this question for you. Not to spoil the anticipation for you, but I didn’t find that much.
Currently in Canada we do not have national physical activity guidelines for children aged 0-5, however CSEP (Canadian Society for Exercise Physiology) has indicated they hope to develop them. The biggest issue is lack of research done for this age group. There is not enough knowledge around how much physical activity is beneficial. We know it’s important; we just don’t have the details yet. Therefore, we may have to wait a while until guidelines are developed.
That being said, there are some guidelines that are out and available.
Many researchers and organizations have referred to the National Association for Sport and Physical Education (NASPE), which provides physical activity guidelines for the 0-5 age range. This is an organization based in the USA. Here are their guidelines.
Some of their key points are listed below:
Toddlers:
- Toddlers should engage in a total of at least 30 minutes of structured physical activity each day.
- Toddlers should engage in at least 60 minutes -- and up to several hours -- per day of unstructured physical activity and should not be sedentary for more than 60 minutes at a time, except when sleeping.
- Toddlers should be given ample opportunities to develop movement skills that will serve as the building blocks for future motor skillfulness and physical activity.
Pre-schoolers:
- Preschoolers should accumulate at least 60 minutes of structured physical activity each day.
- Preschoolers should engage in at least 60 minutes -- and up to several hours -- of unstructured physical activity each day, and should not be sedentary for more than 60 minutes at a time, except when sleeping.
- Preschoolers should be encouraged to develop competence in fundamental motor skills that will serve as the building blocks for future motor skillfulness and physical activity.
Other recommendations I have encountered in the literature (Timmons et al 2007) are:
- Physical activity promotion with this group needs to their natural activity patterns, which are very spontaneous, and intermittent. They are not going to be active like adults or even older children.
- The focus should be on gross motor skills and learning to simply move around. Many refer to this as fundamental movement skills.
- The activities should be fun and not a task they are “required to do”.
- Adults modeling the skills and providing feedback may help the learning process and make it more enjoyable.
- Whenever possible they should be outside and given opportunity to explore outdoor play spaces and equipment.
As for finding research on whether or not children were meeting these guidelines I was not too successful in finding a clear answer for you. The one issue researchers are running into using the NASPE guidelines is they are open to interpretation with regards to intensity.
So this leaves the guidelines open to interpretation by the researcher, or in some cases by the parent or the caregiver reporting on the physical activity. Plus, keeping track of how active a child is at this age is…well tricky.
So the answer remains the same. We don’t really know how active this age group is. But, I think we can be safe to assume they can be moving more.
In my next blog I hope to track down some resources and practical tips on physical activity for this age group. Until then - Cherrio!
Reference:
Timmons, BW; Naylor, PJ and Pfeiffer, KA. (2007). Physical activity for preschool children-how much and how? Canadian Journal of Public Health. 98(2). doi:10.1139/H07-112
