Heat waves and poor air quality from wildfires pose additional challenges for children and youth who need more outdoor exercise and less screen time, 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% of children aged five to 17 met the recommendation of 60 minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise a day.
The letter grade is a slight improvement over the D in 2022, when restrictions from the COVID-19 pandemic caused children to miss organized sports and school activities.
The non-profit organization, which ranks children’s fitness levels every two years using mostly Statistics Canada surveys, found that 31 per cent of girls met physical activity recommendations compared to 57 % 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 benefit from free play and outdoor activities, said the principal investigator Mark Tremblay.
“It’s a very tough aspiration in the world we live in right now, where the built environment is more conducive to being indoors and being inactive,” said Tremblay, who is also a senior scientist with a research group at the obesity at Children’s. Eastern Ontario Hospital Research Institute in Ottawa.
The bulletin says heat waves and smoke-filled air are causing cancellations of sports and recreation activities, which can make children more sedentary.
However, while the increasing impact of climate change means that children, especially those with asthma, should switch to indoor activities, these may 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 16-year-old sister Ella Pringle.
“We consciously try to get them out,” Pringle said next to a field where his sons were trying out a pair of baseball bats.
While both kids get about 35 minutes of exercise a day by walking to school, Aidan plays baseball in a local league and Ella is on the school’s rugby team.
But the annual cost of rugby is $400, which drops to $250 if parents offer something Pringle can only do because his job involves shift work, he said.
“Volunteering during school hours, that’s very difficult for families,” she said.
When the air quality worsens because of the wildfires, the family heads to an indoor pool at a community center that offers free admission only to high school students, but Pringle said it should also be the case of primary school students. The ParticipAction report recommends that physical activity be promoted in the early years of life.
There aren’t enough local recreation facilities, which are overcrowded and charge too much for everything from swimming lessons to winter skating, 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,” Ridley said, adding that this is another downside of addictive devices that keep kids connected electronically while missing out on physical activity and socialization just by stepping outside. house
Dr. Melissa Lem, a family physician and president of the Canadian Association of Environmental Physicians, said that while climate change may make it a challenge for children to go outside, it should be the goal because nature offers both physical and mental benefits. .
“We know that outdoor exercise increases the positive effects. It lowers blood pressure more, improves self-esteem more, and we know that’s a problem, especially among teenagers and children,” he said from Vancouver.
Lem said about 900,000 Canadians have been given a “natural prescription” to visit a park or simply get out as part of a program launched by the BC Parks Foundation in November 2020 before it launches across all provinces in June 2022.
Any regulated health professional, including nurses, psychologists and occupational therapists, can take part in the programme. Patients receive a personalized nature prescription file and the standard “dose” recommends that they spend at least two hours in nature each week, at least 20 minutes at a time.
“The most common pediatric patient for whom I would write a natural prescription is a child who spends a lot of screen time and has mental health or behavioral issues and may be less socially connected with other children,” Lem said. “Very often, it would be a prescription to spend time outdoors, spend time with friends outside instead of inside on the phone on the screen.”
The bulletin gave Canada’s children a D- for active play and found that 22 percent of children and youth spent an average of more than two hours a day in unstructured indoor and outdoor play, something the Canadian Pediatric Society encouraged in its previous new recommendations. this year as part of “risky play” to benefit children’s physical and mental well-being.
Children and youth earned a D in sedentary behavior because 27 percent of them met the recreational screen time limit of no more than two hours per day. That’s more than an F given in 2022.
They got a much better grade of B- for sleep, finding that 65 percent of children and young people met the age-specific recommendations for the amount of sleep they got: nine to 11 hours each night for five to 13 years. adults and eight to 10 hours for those aged 14 to 17.
Just four percent of five- to 17-year-olds met the combined 24-hour movement guidelines for physical activity, sedentary behavior and sleep, earning them the same F as in 2022.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published on May 7, 2024.
Canadian Press health coverage is supported through a partnership with the Canadian Medical Association. CP is solely responsible for this content.
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