(Reuters) – close to half of children at pre-school age does not pass time playing outdoors with one of their parents during the day, despite that this type of game has many benefits for children, including combat obesity child, according to a poll carried out in United States.
In the interviews conducted to the parents of almost 9,000 kids, less than half of the mothers and only a quarter of parents said carried his son to walk or play with them in the garden or in the Park at least once a day.
“Especially for parents who work outside the home (…)” “it is not so easy to have time to play outdoors with their children every day,” said Pooja Tandon, a pediatrician from the University of Washington in Seattle and that he has worked on the new study.
The National Association for sport and physical education guidelines suggest that children will make at least one hour of physical activity every day to obtain long-term health benefits, how to help prevent childhood obesity.
Preschool children should also have some hours playing every day unstructured time.
But, although some parents involve their children are having playing time outdoors in the nursery or school, that would not always be so, said Tandon.
The expert and his colleagues used data from a representative study nationally on American children born in 2001.
Along with other information collected when children were babies, the researchers, whose results were published in Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine, how many times they asked parents of pre-school children had led their children to play outdoors last month.
44 Percent of mothers and 24 percent of parents said they were playing outdoors with their children every day. According to interviews, half of the guys played outdoors at least once a day with one of their parents.
Neighborhood security did not appear to be a major to exit impediment: more than nine of every 10 parents said they felt that their neighborhood was safe.
Non-white children were less likely to go out and play with one of their parents as well as children whose mothers spent more time working outside the home.
Tandon and her colleagues discovered that children with regular game partners were more likely to spend time outdoors, perhaps because parents took turns to take the kids to the Park together, a good strategy for parents with little time.
Tami Benham Deal, who studies child physical activity at the University of Wyoming at Laramie, said that it is also important to assess what kind of exercise do kids when they go out.
“Could be seated in a sandbox, spend 20-30 minutes to build tunnels and sand castles, and the activity could be very low in intensity”, told Reuters Health Benham Deal, which did not take part in new research.
“That parents who encourage their children to be physically active and to recognize the importance and the value of exercise are key factors that influence physical activity of children,” he added. “And this is true at any age”, ended.
