Children's physical activity levels suffering; girls most affected

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SALT LAKE CITY — Children are more inactive than ever before, and girls are seeing the sharpest decline in physical activity, according to a new study.

Scientists out of the Universities of Strathclyde and Newcastle gave 508 school-aged children pedometers and monitored their activity for one week. The researchers found that only 4 percent of the children's waking time — about 20 minutes — was spent doing moderate to vigorous physical activity.

Children with older fathers tended to be less active, and children overall were less active in the winter, the study found.

Somewhat counterintuitively, children whose parents restricted access to the television were actually less active than other children — researchers suggest this may have been caused by children finding positive, athletic role models through watching TV.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest children engage in moderate to vigorous physical activity for 60 minutes a day, three times the amount the study suggests some children are getting. The statistic is more worrisome for girls, who researchers say are significantly less physically active than boys, as a whole.

That may be in part due to habits formed before grade school. According to a recent study published in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, children — especially girls — are spending too little time outside.

Researchers studied 8,950 preschool-aged children and found that nearly half of them were not taken outside by their parents to play each day. And preschool-aged girls were 16-percent less likely to be taken outside than their male counterparts.

The cause of the difference is unclear, according to the study's lead author, pediatrician Pooja Tandom. She said it may be a mixture of a few things, though: societal norms, an assumption that girls are not interested in outside playtime or a genuinely higher interest on the part of boys for more outside time.

Researchers at Strathclyde and Newcastle were particularly concerned by their findings because activity levels have been shown to drop between childhood and adolescence. A 2008 study out of the National Institutes of Health found that, at the time, many children were still meeting the recommended amount of daily physical activity. But by age 15, their activity dropped off by half.

"Lack of physical activity in childhood raises the risk for obesity and its attendant health problems later in life," Dr. Duane Alexander said at the time.

More than one-third of American adults are overweight or obese, a statistic that runs Americans $147 billion per year. Researchers say the key to fighting the alarming statistic is to fight obesity at a young age by teaching children healthy habits — and taking them outside to play.