Heat waves and poor air quality caused by wildfires pose additional challenges for children and young people who need more outdoor exercise and less time looking at screens, according to a new report.
ParticipAction’s latest report card, released Tuesday, gives Canada’s children a D+ in overall physical activity. It found that 39 percent of children ages 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 COVID-19 pandemic restrictions caused children to miss organized sports and school activities.
The non-profit organization, which ranks children’s fitness levels every two years using primarily Statistics Canada surveys, found that 31 per cent of girls met physical activity recommendations compared to 57 per cent of children.
Promoting physical activity among children ages five to 17 “is like swimming against the current” because screens keep them sedentary indoors when they could benefit from free play and outdoor activities, said lead researcher Mark Tremblay.
“It’s a very difficult aspiration in the world we live in now, where the built environment is more conducive to being indoors and inactive,” said Tremblay, who is also senior scientist for an obesity research group at the Children’s Institute of Research from the Eastern Ontario Hospital in Ottawa.
The report card says heat waves and smoky air cause cancellations of sports activities and recess, which can cause children to become more sedentary.
However, while the increasing impact of climate change means that children, especially those with asthma, should do indoor activities, these may be too expensive for many families, Tremblay said.
Chris Ridley and Melanie Pringle of Delta, BC, 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 tried to get them out,” Pringle said standing next to a field where his sons were trying out a pair of baseball bats.
While both boys get about 35 minutes of exercise a day walking to and from 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 is reduced to $250 if parents volunteer, something Pringle can only do because his job involves shift work, he said.
“Volunteering during school hours is very difficult for families,” he said.
When air quality worsens due to wildfires, the family heads to an indoor pool at a community center that offers free admission only to high school students, but Pringle said that should also be the case for elementary students. The ParticipAction report recommends promoting physical activity from an early age.
There aren’t enough local recreational facilities, which fill up 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’s another downside to addictive devices that keep kids electronically connected while they miss out on physical activity and socialization simply by leaving the house.
Dr. Melissa Lem, a family physician and president of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment, said that while climate change may make it difficult for children to get outdoors, that should be the goal because nature provides benefits for physical and mental health. .
“We know that outdoor exercise enhances 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 “nature prescription” to visit a park or simply get outdoors as part of a program launched by the BC Parks Foundation in November 2020 before it rolled out across all provinces. in June 2022.
Any regulated healthcare professional can participate in the programme, including nurses, psychologists and occupational therapists. 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 each time.
“The most common pediatric patient that I would give a nature prescription to is a child who spends a lot of time in front of a screen and who has mental health or behavioral problems and perhaps connects less socially with other children,” Lem said. “More often than not, it would be a recipe for spending time outside, spending time with friends outside rather than inside your phone on the screen.”
The report card gave Canada’s children a D- for active play and found that 22 per cent of children and youth spent an average of more than two hours a day engaging in unstructured indoor and outdoor play, somewhat which the Canadian Pediatric Society encouraged in its new recommendations. earlier this year as part of a “risk 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 a day. That’s up from the F awarded in 2022.
They scored a much better B- on sleep, and found that 65 percent of children and teens met age-specific recommendations for the amount of sleep they got: nine to 11 hours each night for five to 13 years. from 14 to 17 years old.
Only four percent of youth ages five to 17 met the combined 24-hour movement guidelines for physical activity, sedentary behavior and sleep, earning them an F, the same as in 2022.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 7, 2024.
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