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Play
and Physical Activity: Do We Need to Worry About Fitness if
We Just Let Kids Play? A Cautionary Tale in Two Parts
Part 2: The Real Scoop on Physical Activity in Childhood and
What To Do About It
Because we’re worried about childhood obesity, many have
decided that what seems to be reasonable advice for adults
for prevention and treatment of weight problems—eat less
and move more—is just the ticket for children. To get
kids to move more, special physical activity programs are
being developed across the country. Aside from organized sports,
youth organizations, such as the YMCA, are making obesity
prevention and treatment a main focus for programming. In
fact, the national YMCA kicked off a huge initiative in September,
2004 called Activate America with this goal as its mission
(see www.YMCA.net). Now, the YMCA has always been associated
with a good time, with its pools, gymnasiums, and sports programs;
since the 1970s, its afterschool programs, the most numerous
in the country, have kept millions of American children safely
off the streets. But to combat obesity, do we have to engage
little children in exercise programs?
A working definition of physical activity was published in
1985 by Casperson and colleagues in the journal Public Health
Reports. Physical activity is “any bodily movement produced
by skeletal muscles that results in caloric expenditure;”
exercise is a subset of this, being “planned, structured,
and repetetive, and results in the improvement or maintenance
of one or more facets of physical fitness.” It is popular
right now to think that exercise programs are a good thing
for kids, especially for already-chubby children. One such
program, for example, sponsored by a YMCA in Brooklyn, New
York and other organizations, brought in a NY Giants football
player, Amani Toomer, to lead a group of delighted 7-10 year
old children in jumping jacks, push-ups and sit-ups. Clearly
it’s thrilling to have a local hero visit—but do
kids really go for this approach to activity long term? Why
not give them space, adult supervision, play equipment and
let them play?
Research underscores what we know by casually watching children:
they move differently from active adults. Children tend to
be active in spurts, cycling through active movement and calmer
periods. And if you keep an active kid pent up (think: school!),
the first opportunity to be active (hooray, recess!) will
find this child bursting out the door with even greater intensity
and spending the first several minutes of recess engaged in
very intense activity.
So kids don’t tend to engage in sustained aerobic activity
in the way adults work to exercise. But intermittent play
activity will raise childrens’ heart rates and be just
as good a “workout,” as discovered by Brian Barrett,
a physical education teacher and consultant in New Jersey.
Barrett assessed children playing low-organization games,
such as variations on Capture the Flag, that the kids loved.
He summed up his results on children’s play, and physical
activity for kids in general, in an October, 2001 article
called “Play Now, Play Later: Lifetime Fitness Implications”
in the Journal of Physical Education, Recreation and Dance.
Exercise is a turn-off when it involves comparison between
students or to a standard, no choice of level of participation
and the feeling of incompetence in an activity; children prefer
their physical activity to be fun, which includes several
criteria, such as 1) lots of action; 2) no elimination; 3)
a chance to be with friends. Barrett’s work with kids
supported the 1992 recommendation from the Council on Physical
Education for Children that kids’ physical activity programs
should not be “watered down” versions of adult programs.
(For an excellent list of research articles on childrens’
physical education, see: http://www.pecentral.org/preschool/preschoolresources.html).
Furthermore, children who play and move naturally may become
better athletes eventually than kids who are overconditioned
in just one sport. The November 28, 2004 Sunday New York Times
Magazine was devoted to the theme of over-the-top trends in
modern childhood. A rather astonishing article in this issue
by Michael Sokolove described an elite Florida training institute
called IMG for young team and individual sport athletes. There
in Bradenton, young baseball players, golfers, tennis players
and so forth (girls softball is next) board for nine months
a year to receive intensive training in their sport, practicing
more than 20 hours per week; for this privilege, parents might
pay $70,000 per year, when all the costs are factored in.
Interestingly, several coaches interviewed described the poor
all-around athletic ability of many of these kids: batters
who can’t run, tennis players who can’t hop, skip
or jump, basketball players who can’t swing a bat. In
comparison, Sokolove reminds us, kids who play freely are
natural cross-trainers. “They climb trees, wade in streams,
play whatever sport is in season and make up their own games.”
The cost of specialization may be more than loss of childhood
and all-around athletic ability. Overuse injuries (caused
by one motion repeated continually over time) are rampant,
both at IMG and among American child athletes in general.
The National SAFE KIDS Campaign tells us that of the 3.5 million
sports injuries each year in American children under age 14,
around 50% of them are overuse injuries (see www.safekids.org
).
So, if your child is not getting injured, is he or she having
fun playing organized sports? A favorite story I like to tell
is of my middle son in his last year of Pony League baseball.
It was a hot, muggy summer day, and a whole row of utterly
bored 13-year olds sat on the bench waiting their turn to
bat. They’d been warned, as usual, by stern dad-coaches
to “quit horsing around and pay attention to the game!”
Suddenly, out of nowhere, we heard thunder and saw lightning,
meaning the kids had to get off the field for at least 20
minutes. Everyone dashed for the park pavillion 100 yards
away and the boys began to holler and whoop as the downpour
started. And then they began to have fun, yelling, throwing
each other around, riding piggyback to play chicken, getting
soaked and dirty. It was more fun than I’d seen my son
have playing a sport in a long time.
Another story is of the end-of-the-year middle school picnic
I chaperoned one year. The entire eighth grade class was scheduled
to be at a local park all day long—without any scheduled
activities but with some equipment. What did they do when
left to their own devices? Why, they organized a 40-person
softball game, at least 20 people on the field at once, played
with tennis balls (many at once, somehow) and a bat. It was
a rip-roaring good time, and boys and girls, athletic and
uncoordinated, fat and thin, friends and strangers, all played
together. Do you remember playing in this way when you were
a kid, having such a good time at your own games that you
didn’t want to stop? Did you get that kind of joy out
of doing jumping jacks in gym? The bent arm hang? (My personal
nemesis.) Of course, organized sports confer many, many positive
benefits for children and of course they are fun, in particular,
for naturally gifted athletes. But especially for young children,
we must remember that exercise and organized sports are absolutely
not the same as play and that children need play.
How else have natural childhood activities changed in the
last couple decades? Getting back to recess, its worth has
been questioned and so it’s made the chopping block,
especially in the climate of the No Child Left Behind Act.
(Other “wasteful” minutes the NCLB act forces schools
to trim include those from nap-time, lunch hour, and class
change time) (The American School Board Journal, May 2004).
But there is quite a bit of research to support that recess
is crucial to the child’s school day, again because it
lets them be kids. The list of benefits is very long, starting
with increased physical activity; social benefits include
opportunities to build relationships, resolve conflicts, and
interact with kids of other ages, gender, and ethnicity; promotion
of self-esteem; and even enhanced language development. Stress
management and attention to schoolwork also improve with recess.
(The Educational Forum, Fall 2001; Journal of Research in
Childhood Education, Fall/Winter 1996)
Even the simple act of walking to school has all but disappeared
in America, with under 25% of American children regularly
hoofing it to school. This certainly contributes to being
less active, but, like play, walking to school appears to
have importance well beyond just burning calories. (Check
out the annual International Walk to School effort! See www.iwalktoschool.org)
Tangible benefits include saving fuel, getting the community
out on the streets which makes them safer for all, reducing
congestion and traffic near schools, and possibly increasing
parent-child interaction for younger children. But there’s
more. At a recent Healthy Livable Communities conference at
Michigan State University in November 2004, Dr. Catherine
O’Brien, a researcher at the Centre for Sustainable Transportation
in Ontario, stated that when children can walk to school,
the more intangible (or, unrecognized) benefits include a
greater ability to explore the world and connect to other
people, as well as an overall increase in happiness. I am
reminded of a wonderful short tale by Jay O’Callahan,
a storyteller from Boston, called “Brian.” It’s
about a dreamy young boy who keeps getting in trouble with
his teacher for being late to school. When his mom asks him
why this keeps happening, he tells her it’s because he
has to rescue the worms from the sidewalk. (His mom recognizes
the wonder in this; we know they’ll get it worked out.)
(See www.ocallahan.com for descriptions of these wondeful
storytelling tapes and CDs.)
So what are we to do with our sedentary kids? I feel the answer
is clear. Remove the obstacles that prevent them from being
kids. Let them play. I think we’re working too hard at
the wrong thing when we try to come up with elaborate exercise
programs for children to improve their physical activity—it’s
not only not particularly helpful, it’s harmful. Like
David Elkind, we can all be advocates for the preservation
of childhood. By restoring play to childhood and protecting
it at all costs, we will have healthier children, both physically
and emotionally. Go turn off the TV and shoo the whining kids
outdoors—or at least out of your earshot! It will do
us all good.
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