Is Your Child Getting Enough Exercise?
How much exercise does your child have each day? Is it at least an hour, which is what the Government in the UK recommends? I can imagine most parents reading this would think that their child gets about an hour’s exercise each day – they are always running around and then they have sport at school, don’t they?
Well, apparently parents are over estimating the amount of exercise their children have each day. According to a report on the BBC website about a study in the journal Archives of Disease in Childhood, parents have been claiming that their children have about two hours exercise a day when in fact the reality is more like 30 minutes… How come they have got it so wrong?
Professor Terry Wilkins of the Peninsula Medical School in Devon, England, who is a researcher into child exercise, summed it up well:
“What this shows is that parents really don’t have a clue what their children are doing in terms of exercise.” (Don’t beat around the bush – Beeble)
Are they just guessing?
I suppose it’s not that easy working out exactly how much exercise your child gets and quite a lot of guesswork is involved. For example parents may have very little idea how much physical activity their child has at school: some schools in the UK have sports and gym sessions every day, whereas others may just have a couple of session a week. Do parents imagine their children are rushing around during playtime? Maybe their child isn’t particularly active and prefers to sit and chat with friends.
The “Accelerometer”
Scientists at the Universities of Newcastle and Glasgow have tried to monitor children to find out exactly how much exercise they are doing. They fitted 130 six to seven year olds with an “accelerometer” which is a portable device worn on the waist which measured how the child was moving each day. It could measure the amount of time spent doing vigorous physical activities such as brisk walking, running and sport.
The parents were wrong
When the parents were asked how much exercise they felt their child had done, their estimates were way off the mark: they believed that 83% of the boys and 56% of the girls tested had achieved an hour’s exercise a day. The facts were very different: the accelerometer showed that only 3% of boys and 2% of girls had reached the required target of an hour’s exercise a day.
The BBC report states that one in three 11 year olds in the UK are overweight or obese using the body mass index method of measurement and clearly 30 minutes exercise a day is not going to solve this problem.
Beebleblog’s advice to parents
I know that my opinion will fall onto some deaf ears, but these obesity reports on children are becoming ever more popular so it is only a matter of time before we can no longer ignore the facts. As a parent you are in charge of someone’s life, you are a role model and it is your actions and beliefs that rub off on your children. Parents can sit their children in front of the television and rely on the school for exercise and activity but you have to remember at the end of the day your child’s health comes down to you, the parent. Playtime should mean being outdoors, with moving around activities and not television and computer games, even if they do involve some movement or are exercise related.
So our advice is to get outside and exercise with your children, play the games they want to play and introduce them to different sports where there can learn co-ordination, team work and how to burn off some of that excess energy. You never know you may find that you benefit your own health as well!
To read the whole article see: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7603610.stm
