‘Children should not have smartphones’: The battle to get kids active and fit

Children today are less fit than previous generations, which will serve them no purpose as adults in a warmer world. By Nicky Pellegrino

The heat wave that has persisted throughout the European summer has
exacted a price on people’s health. Extreme heat can trigger a variety of stress conditions, including heat stroke, and as the body works harder to keep its core temperature at normal levels, it puts pressure on the heart, lungs, and kidneys.

High temperatures increase the risk of heart disease and death, and studies have shown that the burden of heat-related heart attacks is likely to increase with 2-3°C of global warming. Therefore, as the planet warms, future generations will need to be physically fit and maintain optimal cardiovascular health to thrive.

Unfortunately, the opposite is happening, says Shawnda Morrison, a cardiovascular and environmental physiologist. Morrison completed her Ph.D. at the University of Otago and now resides in Slovenia, where she is involved in SLOfit, a longitudinal study of children’s physical and motor fitness.

“Every school-age child in Slovenia is tested once a year in April,” she says. “They do a number of fitness tests in their physical education classes, so we have a lot of data.”

Children’s fitness and activity levels have declined around the world, with a 2018 WHO report concluding that 80 percent of 11-17 year olds are not physically active enough. Evidence from SLOfit has shown that this decline accelerated during the Covid-19 lockdowns.

“We found the largest decline in childhood fitness in the 30-year record of this longitudinal follow-up, and it was across the board: aerobic fitness, musculoskeletal flexibility, reaction time — all the different components.”

Families may have gone for walks together in their neighborhoods during the closures, but the intensity of the exercise the children were doing was not high enough to maintain fitness compared to the workouts that education classes would have provided. school physical or organized sport.

Morrison, who works at the sports faculty at the University of Ljubljana, wanted to delve deeper into the topic of physical fitness as global temperatures rise. In a review of more than 150 studies, published in the journal Temperature, he found that children’s aerobic capacity is 30 percent lower than that of their parents at the same age.

Highlighted in the research is a study of 457 primary school-age children in Thailand, which found that overweight youths were more than twice as likely to have difficulty regulating their body temperature when exercising outdoors than those of normal weight.

Children thermoregulate a little differently than adults. They sweat less and instead lose heat by increasing blood flow to the skin, a process that can require the heart to work harder. When they’re physically fit, their hearts are stronger and able to pump more blood flow per beat, so their blood vessels will be more reactive and efficient, says Morrison. In addition, there is a better chance that they will grow into fit and active adults who will be able to better tolerate higher temperatures.

“However, as the world warms, children are the least fit they’ve ever been.”

How do we change things? Morrison has some ideas.

“We have to build our society around the concept that we need to move our bodies,” she says. “That includes mandatory physical education classes in all schools taught by physical education teachers. Parents have a very important role to play, especially with children ages 3-10. We need to make physical literacy a priority. If you know how catch, run, jump, swim and follow basic movement patterns, then you will enjoy moving. If you don’t feel safe, then you can be sedentary all your life.”

She advises no more than an hour of recreational screen time a day, and that means any screen, and she practices what she preaches. Morrison doesn’t have a smartphone and even on hot days this summer she has made sure that her two young children have had a chance to run in the relative cool of the night, providing them with plenty of water to prevent dehydration.

New Zealand, with its great outdoors, is well positioned to make a positive difference to our children’s future fitness and health, she says.

“But parents need to be extremely diligent about modeling the right behavior. And kids shouldn’t have smartphones.”