Childcare centers aren't spending enough time playing outdoors: Report

By Dr. Ananya Mandal, MDJan 5 2012

According to a new study children in daycare may spend more time sitting around and not enough time being active. Pediatric experts recommend preschoolers get 90 - 120 minutes of activity daily such as running and playing games like tag, and that children be taken outdoors twice a day.

The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Public Health Association, and the National Resource Center for Health and Safety in Child Care and Early Education also recommend that preschoolers should be allowed an hour and a half to two hours of moderate to vigorous physical activity each day.

The study published in the journal Pediatrics finds preschoolers in childcare centers aren't spending enough time playing outdoors and just being kids. Researchers talked to the staff at 49 child care centers in Cincinnati, Ohio. They found an emphasis on classroom learning policies to prevent playground injury and budgetary constraints meant children were not getting enough physical activity.

“Physical activity is essential for kids in this age group for preventing obesity and for development,” said lead study author Dr. Kristen Copeland, a professor at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center. The children are “still learning how to skip, how to play with balls, how to share and take turns. But the teachers were saying they were pressured by the parents and somewhat by state early learning standards to emphasize classroom learning,” Copeland told Reuters Health.

More than half of kids aged three to five years in the United States go to daycare centers, preschools or nursery schools authors wrote. Although the teachers agreed that moving around is important, safety concerns were also a big barrier to kids' time spent running around and climbing. Some of the teachers said that parents have asked for their kids to sit out of any vigorous activity to avoid getting hurt on the playground.

In cases when outdoor equipment had been updated to meet safety standards, the gear became boring and kids either tired of playing on it or they used it dangerously to make it more stimulating, the providers reported. Daycare facilities couldn't always afford sufficiently challenging equipment, they said.

“Young children learn by moving,” said Russell Pate, a professor at the University of South Carolina who was not involved in this study. “I am concerned that preschools and child care centers are placing a very heavy focus on the development of pre-academic skills.” This research “adds in a significant way to a growing body of information that indicates that the characteristics of preschools influence the physical activity levels of young children,” Pate told Reuters Health. Pate has also shown in earlier work that children spend a very small portion of their time in daycare moving around vigorously.