Educators are worried about those children who are slow in developing their motor skills. There is also a concern that too many young children are overweight for their age. It seems that these two problems can be addressed with the help of an App.
“Fundamental motor skills like hopping, running and throwing a ball are critical to physical activity,” said Amanda Staiano, Ph.D., Associate Professor at Pennington Biomedical Research Center. “But these movement skills don’t emerge naturally. They must be taught, practiced and reinforced.” In addition, physical activity is a crucial part of preventing childhood obesity,”
Almost all preschoolers are physically active at least part of the day. The problem is that preschoolers who don’t get a chance to kick or throw a ball or jump and play hopscotch don’t develop the basic skills they need to get involved in more organized sports and activities in grade school. As they get older, children drift into more sedentary behaviour, depriving them of opportunities to build strong hearts and muscles and raising their risk of obesity and other chronic illnesses.
“Unfortunately, 77 percent of preschoolers are far below average when it comes to basic motor skills,” Dr. Staiano said. “Improving those skills usually means waiting until more formalized physical education is available or attending programs that might have instructors with motor expertise, but this approach delays the onset of structured opportunities or limits the number of children who can get help.”
Apps may be the answer.
A 12-week app program boosted children’s motor skills an average of 15.5 percentage points, taking them from below average to average rating, according to a new study published in the journal Pediatrics.
The study enrolled 72 children whose ages ranged from 3 to 5 years. These children were divided into two groups. The parents of both groups were given an App to download on their phones. One group’s App provided three months of activities, lessons and games to promote children’s ‘free play’ time. The other group’s App provided a structured programme of specific motor skills – hopping, throwing, sliding, kicking, jumping and catching – for 12 minutes per day.
Children in the structured programme improved their motor skills significantly when compared to those in the free play group. In addition, three months after the end of the programme, the pre-schoolers in the structured programme showed that they maintained their higher level of motor skills. Children in the free play group saw their motor skills decline.
The significance of this study is that parents and teachers can help reinforce children’s motor skill development by attending to the types of activities the children engage in, especially in the preschool years. Children can benefit by being given an early start in developing good motor skills.
Preschoolers’ fine and gross motor skill development is indicative of later performance on two key measures of kindergarten readiness, according to a study published recently by researchers from Oregon State University.
Preschoolers who performed better on fine and gross motor skill assessments early in the school year were more likely to have better social behaviour and “executive function,” or ability to pay attention, follow directions and stay on task later in the school year, scientists said.
“Physical activity and motor skills are important for preparing for school and for life,” said Megan MacDonald, an assistant professor in OSU’s College of Public Health and Human Sciences and lead author of the study.” Now that we know these things are linked to school readiness, we have more tools to share with parents and educators so they can help young children be ready for school.”
The findings were published in Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, and supported by the Environmental Health Sciences Center and the Hallie E. Ford Center for Healthy Children and Families at OSU and OSU-Cascades. The work included an interdisciplinary team of researchers.
Past research has proven that good social behaviour, including cooperation, is key to a healthy transition to school. Other research has shown that children with strong executive function skills are more likely to be successful in kindergarten and beyond. Executive function, also known as self-regulation, includes ability to pay attention, follow directions and persist through difficulty.
For the study, researchers used a range of assessments to measure the fine and gross motor skills, as well as the executive function and social behaviour, of 92 children, ages 3-5. The assessments were conducted in fall and again in spring.
Results showed that fall measures of visual motor integration skills – a type of fine motor skills – predicted children’s scores on executive function tasks in the spring. Children’s object manipulation skills, a type of gross motor skill, predicted their scores on spring social behaviour assessments.
The researchers found that children with strong fine motor skills also showed better executive function skills, and stronger gross motor skills predicted better social behaviour.
“The findings speak to the potential role, early on, of fine and gross motor skill development,” MacDonald said. “In kindergarten, children are playing games, socializing, lining up on the playground and more, which children learn through exposure and experience. For a variety of reasons, some children come into school not prepared for those things.”
Additional research is needed to better understand how or why motor skills are linked to these key school readiness skills, but the findings underscore the importance of exposing young children to play and physical activity, which are essential to developing their fine and gross motor skills, MacDonald said.
“If we know this, then that gives us some things we can advise parents to focus on if they want to help prepare their child for school,” she said.
Fine motor skill development could include stacking blocks or other items, copying circles on a page or playing with creative toys such as Legos or crayons. Gross motor skill development could include things like playing catch, playing on toys at the park or drawing a line on the sidewalk and having the child jump back and forth over it.
“Kids need to move. It’s part of who they are at that age,” MacDonald said. “It’s important to remember to give them time to do it.”
Requiring your children to do chores on a regular basis may be associated with them having better academic performance and problem solving skills, according to new research from La Trobe University.
The study, led by Ph.D. candidate Deanna Tepper and published in Australian Occupational Therapy, found that regular chores were associated with better executive functions—planning, self-regulation, switching between tasks and remembering instructions.
Tepper said the study’s results indicate that interventions that incorporate household chore-like activities such as cooking or gardening may be particularly beneficial for children.
“Parents may be able to use age and ability-appropriate chores to facilitate the development of executive functions,” Tepper said.
“Children who cook a family meal or weed the garden on a regular basis may be more likely to excel in other aspects of life—like schoolwork or problem solving.”
The study looked at parents and guardians of 207 children aged between 5 and 13 years. In mid-2020, the parents/guardians were asked to complete questionnaires on the number of chores their children completed daily and their child’s executive function.
The researchers found that engagement in self-care chores, such as making themselves a meal, and family-care chores, for instance making someone else a meal, significantly predicted working memory and inhibition (the ability to think before acting), after controlling for the influence of age, gender and presence or absence of a disability.
While previous research has shown that engaging children in age-appropriate chores can increase feelings of autonomy and is associated with improved prosocial behaviours and greater life satisfaction, this is the first study to look at the association between regular chores and child cognitive development, particularly executive functioning.
Executive functions are commonly defined as: working memory; the ability to monitor and manipulate temporary information; inhibition, the ability to inhibit automatic responses or suppress irrelevant information to focus on a task; and shifting, the ability to move focus between tasks
“Typically, these skills begin to develop in early childhood and continue to develop into late adolescence and early adulthood,” Tepper said.
“Impairments or delays in executive functioning development can lead to difficulties in the ability to self-regulate, plan, and problem solve as adults, having implications later in life on reading performance and mathematical ability, as well as predicting overall academic achievement in later childhood.”
Early development of executive functioning has also been linked to engagement in tertiary education and improved physical health and better financial status in adulthood.
“Research indicates it may be possible to improve executive functions by developing individualized learning activities and routines,” Tepper said.
“We hypothesized that children who engaged in more household chores would have better inhibition and working memory. Our findings likely reflect that most chores require individuals to self-regulate, maintain attention, plan, and switch between tasks, thereby supporting the development of executive functioning.”
According to Len Canter, writing in Healthday Reporter, being responsible for some of the everyday tasks needed to run a home can benefit children. Engaging youngsters in age-appropriate chores from an early age teaches them invaluable life skills, instils in them a sense of responsibility and boosts self-esteem through accomplishment, according to the experts at the non-profit Understood.org.
What’s age-appropriate? The youngest child can learn one-step jobs like putting toys back in a toy box or returning books to a shelf. They can progress to making their bed, helping put away groceries, setting the table and raking leaves. Of course, Mom and Dad will need to show them how things are done. Writing out a list of steps or making drawings of how to complete a task will help kids with learning difficulties.
To establish each child’s chores and prevent their execution from becoming haphazard, create a calendar that lists every family member’s name, their tasks and scheduled days and times. Try to make the chores consistent from week to week, and be sure they don’t conflict with other important activities on set days.
For the greatest success, monitor your children’s progress and be there to offer suggestions if they stumble so that they’re able to complete the job rather than abandon it or have you take it over out of frustration. Acknowledge every job well done with a note or sticker on the calendar.
You might even follow up a chore with a truly fun activity. Once kids reach the age when you find it appropriate to give an allowance, consider offering a monetary reward for more labour-intensive chores.
Source: University of Southern Denmark Faculty of Health Sciences
Many of us feel that young people these days are spending too much of their free time on screens and missing out on physical activities. This might be a misconception because children have always been sedentary during most of their awake time.
This has been shown every time researchers have measured physical activity among different groups of children regardless of their cultural background and geography (also before the introduction of smartphones and gaming consoles). Thus, researchers continue to debate whether children’s use of screen media devices truly affects their engagement in physical activity or if screen time is just replacing other sedentary behaviours. A group of researchers from the University of Southern Denmark has attempted to answer this question in a carefully designed randomized controlled trial.
A total of 89 families (181 children, 164 adults) were randomly allocated in two groups. Families allocated to the intervention had to handover their smartphones and tablets for two weeks and reduce their recreational screen media use to less than three hours per week. Families allocated to the control group were instructed to continue with their usual screen media habits. Participants daily physical activity was objectively assessed over seven days using accelerometers mounted on the thigh and trunk at baseline and at 2-week follow-up.
“We found that children in the screen reduction intervention group had an average of 45 min more daily physical activity compared to children in the control group. The difference between the groups were largest on weekend days where children in the screen reduction group had an average of 73 min more physical activity compared to children in the control group,” says Jesper Pedersen, Ph.D. student at the University of Southern Denmark.
“The results of our trial clearly suggest that spending many hours using digital screens after school, kindergarten, and on weekends displaces some activities where children move more around. Thus, it is important that families with children create healthy and balanced use of screen devices in the home environment,” says Anders Grøntved, Professor at the University of Southern Denmark.
Parents were also a part of the study. Middle-aged or young adults are typically less physically active during their leisure time compared to children and their recreational use of screen media devices is at least as high as that of children. However, to the researchers surprise, there was no significant difference in daily movement during leisure between adults in the screen reduction group and the control group.
“We were quite surprised when we saw the numbers for the adult participants. A potential explanation may be that adults are less spontaneous in their physical activity behaviour compared to children. Although the results suggest that reducing screen media use is an ineffective way of increasing adults daily movement, it may still be a good idea for adults to balance their screen use in the home because we know from previous research that parental screen use in the home is strongly associated with children’s use of screen media. A reduction of recreational screen use among parents could be a key to balancing children’s own use,” explains Grøntved.
Whether it is watching television or playing electronic games, teenagers are experiencing serious physical and mental health consequences after just two hours of screen use, according to University of Queensland-led research.
The study is published in American Journal of Preventive Medicine. This article is taken from the University of Queensland.
UQ School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences researcher Associate Professor Asad Khan said the global study of more than 400,000 adolescents is the first to provide evidence that both passive and mentally active screen time adversely affects teens’ mental wellbeing.
“Teens need to be limited to less than two hours per day, whether it’s passive screen time which includes watching a TV series and scrolling on social media or mentally active screen time, like playing computer games or using a computer for entertainment purposes,” Dr. Khan said.
“We found teens are more likely to report psychosomatic symptoms, , a combination of physical and psychological complaints, if they exceed two hours of screen time and these effects were similar regardless of physical activity levels.
“Psyche stands for mind and soma stands for body, and it is no longer possible to separate mind and body, which is why we looked at psychosomatic complaints together.
“Psychological complaints from teens included feeling low, irritable, nervousness and sleeping difficulty, and somatic complaints included headaches, abdominal pain, , backache and dizziness.”
Key study findings showed teen boys who watched more than four hours of television per day, compared with those who watched less than two hours per day were 67% more likely to report high psychosomatic complaints while girls were at slightly higher risk at 71%.
Adolescents who exceeded four hours of playing electronic games had a 78% higher risk in boys and 88% in girls of reporting high psychosomatic complaints.
High computer use for entertainment purposes was also reported to result in high psychosomatic complaints, with 84% higher risk in boys and 108% high in girls.
“The findings of this study are concerning as screen use in teens has increased significantly in recent decades, but we know little about the effects of different types of screen use on mental and physical health,” Dr. Khan said.
“Our findings support existing public health recommendations of limiting screen use to a maximum of two hours per day for improved health and wellbeing outcomes of teens.
“We hope this work contributes towards the global debate on ‘how much is too much’ screen use for teenagers and builds pressure around reducing discretional screen time to optimize health and wellbeing of adolescents.”
The research was conducted in collaboration with Queen’s University and University of Ottawa, Canada.
