Canadian kids are spending too much time in front of screens, not getting enough exercise, and now you can officially add not getting enough sleep to the worrying list of bad lifestyle habits.
This 2016 Participaction Report Card found that 31 per cent of school-aged children and 26 per cent of adolescents are sleep deprived.
On top of that, in a finding that should be a surprise to nobody, only nine per cent of children get enough physical activity each day and only 24 per cent spend two hours a day or less in front of a screen — everyone else spends more, sometimes a lot more.
All of the above is also true of a large and growing proportion of adults in Canadian society. We spend too much time sitting. We spend too much time in front of the computer and the television. We don’t exercise enough. We are, as a population, getting fatter and sicker.
Only about nine per cent of kids get enough heart-pumping physical activity.
“As parents, we need to set good examples and be good role models,” said Elio Antunes, president and CEO of Participaction. “We need to put down our screens, we need to ensure we’re getting adequate sleep, we need to ensure that we’re active with our family and so we need to build in routines that support physical activity on a daily basis.”
It’s the trickle-down effect in an extremely undesirable area. Our kids mimic the lives that we’re living. The good news about that is that it’s well within our power to change to a healthier lifestyle and benefit the entire family. Spend family time running around outdoors doing a physical activity everyone loves, rather than everyone disappearing into their own electronic devices.
It may be a way to keep the kids quiet and somewhere that you can easily monitor them, but sitting them down in front of a screen for hours on end while you get chores done is also dooming them to ill-health. So turn it off and send them outside to play.
