Kids in daycare are more sedentary than you'd think. These educators aim to get preschoolers moving
3- and 4-year-olds sedentary for 43 minutes per hour at child care, researchers find
Most days, Lisa Cloutier takes her preschool class outside: exploring the forest nearby or running around the east Toronto school where their daycare is located.
"Kids naturally are curious. They're going to try to climb the bleachers and jump off the top," said the longtime early childhood educator (ECE), who recalls scrambling over rocks and trees all day herself when growing up in Nova Scotia.
"I think we're seeing a huge shift to going back to how it was when we were kids."
The polar vortex that blasted Toronto this week put a wrench into those plans, with Cloutier and her co-workers forced to get creative with kids indoors. Still, she believes physical activity is vital, especially after she's noticed more young people — including her own teens — increasingly gravitating to screens and sedentary behaviour since the pandemic.
Think of a daycare and you likely picture tiny kiddos dashing around all day. Yet youngsters in child care are spending more time sedentary than you'd expect — a concern because it can impact their development of fundamental movement, social and cognitive skills.
An expanding initiative aims to support ECEs across Canada in getting more preschoolers active.
"We definitely need more movement," said Cloutier, a registered ECE at NYAD, a multi-location daycare inside several east-end Toronto District School Board schools.
"You have to be consciously making the effort to find time in your day."
'Heart-pumping' movement
Kids play and learn at daycare, but much of the activity can take place while relatively stationary — sitting during storytime, for instance, or while digging in a sand pit, or standing to play with a toy kitchen.
In a recent analysis, a team at Western University's Child Health and Physical Activity Lab found that preschool children "spent around 43 minutes per hour whilst at child care sedentary," said Sophie Phillips, a postdoctoral researcher involved with the project.
That correlates with research from Statistics Canada's regular Canadian Health Measures Survey about the daily physical activity of this young cohort, added Trish Tucker, director of the CHPA Lab and associate director of research at Western's school of occupational therapy.
"We've seen for a number of years that kids engage in fairly high levels of screen time and sedentary time over the course of the day," she said.
The Canadian 24-Hour Movement Guidelines for the Early Years suggest preschoolers get at least 60 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity daily: think movement that's energetic and heart-pumping — anything from running and jumping, to dancing and skipping, Phillips explained.
"It doesn't matter in what sort of bouts of time that that activity occurs; just throughout the entire waking hours of the day."
Literacy and numeracy typically take centre stage in education, but building physical literacy is also important for the early years, when youngsters benefit from learning how to move their bodies with co-ordination and confidence.
Fundamental skills — like how to climb, kick or throw a ball, run, bend and stretch, hop on one foot — come before the sports, dance and other activities that usually start once school begins.
Higher intensity physical activity has a range of positive outcomes for kids under five, Phillips said, from helping them build and strengthen gross-motor skills, fitness and bone health, to aiding cognitive development and social skills, like self-regulation.
E-course aims to tackle barriers
Daycares can face barriers to getting kids moving, from limited indoor and outdoor space restrictions to extreme weather (both in winter and summer) scuttling plans for active play outside, Tucker pointed out.
Some educators may prioritize calm environments and controlling chaotic behaviour inside classes. That post-secondary ECE training programs don't necessarily teach the importance of energetic physical activity is an issue as well, she said.
Physical activity and sedentary behaviour policies also differ amongst provinces and territories: Ontario has outdoor play requirements for daycares, which is not the same as, but has some correlation with, physical activity, Tucker noted, whereas B.C. does issue guidance around physical activity.
Provincial and territorial governments have an opportunity to enact clearer direction around physical activity and sedentary behaviour, Tucker said, since current inconsistency leaves decision-making and programming up to individual daycares, with most lacking formal policies.
Having heard from educators about the need for more training and support, Tucker and her team have developed an e-learning course to help bridge the gap, tapping the expertise of experienced ECEs and physical activity and sedentary behaviour experts.
Approximately 700 educators (both working and those training) in 11 of the 13 provinces and territories have already taken the course, which has been supported by the Canadian Childcare Federation and comes with a certificate after completion. A French-language version is currently being tested.
Though already an advocate of teaching active movement and play for preschoolers, Alberta educator Jennifer Usher admits she was "quite shocked" at some of the stats on sedentary behaviour in the course.
The Medicine Hat College ECE program co-ordinator and instructor appreciates that rather than just being theoretical, the modules showcase daycare educators in action and include strategies her ECE students can implement immediately in their practicum placements.
"It's not about, 'Here's the gym, or here's the outdoor play structure; now I'm gonna sit back and just relax and supervise,'" she said, but rather, "'I can get in there with children and help them build their physical literacy skills.'"
Back in Toronto, this week's frigid temperatures saw RECE Cloutier and her colleagues opting to push furniture back for "ice hockey on the carpet" in one classroom and a gymnastics obstacle course in another.
"You can do songs with movement, you can do dance. There are ways to move the body," she said.
With files from Deana Sumanac-Johnson and Nazima Walji
