Inactive children? Not around here...

[sylvia_rachel]

So, SP is participating in a study on the activity levels of Canadian children and youth (ages 5 to 19), for which purpose she has to wear a pedometer for a week and record the number of steps it says she's taken each day. (It's a very clever pedometer, with a failsafe string thingy and a cover that prevents you from pressing the "reset" button

Comments

[kiwano]

Knowing as many other kids as I do who actually get enough physical activity, I have a suspicion that instead of SP being dismissed as an outlier, the distribution of step counts will actually end up being bimodal. My cynicism lies instead in the suspicion that once this distribution is discovered, the researchers conducting the survey will want to look at what sort of lifestyle/parenting factors seem to correspond to children belonging to one distribution or the other, but there won't be any funding available for that.

[sylvia_rachel]

Mmm, I hadn't thought of that possibility.

There was a structured interview component as well, in which we discussed things like does kid play organized sports (no), does kid watch TV between school and dinner (not usually -- strangely, they did not ask about *after* dinner. Why?), how does kid get to school (bus, sometimes walking), etc.

I'm waiting for someone to discover that kids who play organized sports actually are less active than those who don't but who get to play outside a lot ...

[kiwano]

Or at least that participation in organized sports only corresponds to an increase in physical activity that is directly attributable to the sport itself. I think that the loss in activity among the organized sports crowd (vs. the play outside a lot crowd) is something that mainly kicks in when they grow up, and are faced with the choice of either helping to run an adult team/league in order to keep playing their sport of choice, or just watching the professional league play said same sport. Opportunities to just play outside (or to get around by walking/biking, or...) don't seem to go away in the same manner.

[sylvia_rachel]

Well, yes, that too. But what I was thinking about was the difference for kids between playing, say, competitive soccer (and I'm using soccer as an example because it's the best-case team sport: way less time spent putting on equipment than hockey or lacrosse or football, way less time standing around doing bugger all than softball) and just running around outside playing with your friends, undirected by adults. In the first case you are probably driven to your practices and games; you get to play only when the coach says you do; at practices, you may spend quite a bit more time drilling particular skills than actually running around and thus exercising your whole body. And the more time you're spending at soccer practice, the less time you're spending doing anything else

[kiwano]

Yeah, I was also a child who really didn't like organized team sports (and wasn't all that keen on organized sports or team sports in general), but I did like to traipse around in vacant lots and hydro fields, and I also really liked to ride my bike. Needless to say, I'm quite happy to be away from nearly all those organized sports of my youth, yet I was still in good enough shape 2 years ago to bike solo from Vancouver to Halifax. I'm really hoping that the data analysis can get done to show that unstructured outdoor play encourages far more physical activity than organized sports or team sports.