American parents aren’t taking our preschoolers, and in particular our preschool girls, out to play. According to a study published online Monday in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, about half of the parents of preschoolers in a national sample said they did not take their children outside daily — a result that the researchers say suggests the children aren’t getting the level of physical activity they need.  Parents of preschool-age children answered a single question as part of the much larger Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort: “In the past month, how often did you take [child] outside for a walk or to play in yard, a park, or a playground?” Response categories were: “once a day or more,” “few times a week,” “few times a month,” “rarely” or “not at all.”  How would you answer? Only 51 percent of parents said “once a day or more.”  This is a statistic that comes with plenty of caveats. More than 80 percent of the children were in some type of nonparental childcare arrangement, and may have gone outside daily as a part of that arrangement. There was no information available as to the season during which parents responded to the question (one that many people would answer very differently in August than in February). And as with any self-reported data, there are questions of interpretation and the perceived social desirability of a particular response.  But even accepting all of those limitations, the parents of little boys were 16 percent more likely to say they took their children out daily. (White mothers were also significantly more likely to take their children outside to play than Asian, black or Hispanic mothers, a statistic that gives rise to even more questions.) Sixteen percent isn’t huge, but it is significant.  Why are our little girls playing safely and tidily indoors? The researchers behind this article suggest that little boys may be perceived by parents as more in need of vigorous activity, more athletically inclined or even more willing to get dirty. Those aren’t conclusions most of us want to be consciously coming to about our daughters, but (as when we fail to talk to our daughters about math) some stereotypes are tucked so deeply into our minds that we act on them without even knowing they’re there.  At the societal level, these researchers suggest more efforts to increase outdoor play for all children, particularly targeted at nonwhite parents and the parents of girls, along with more encouragement from pediatricians to get families outside, and more research focused on understanding the correlation between outdoor play and physical activity level among preschoolers. Few would argue with that.  But for individual parents, especially as spring approaches and the days get longer, this research is just one of those little reminders. Can we take the time to take a walk or sit on the front porch after dinner instead of the couch? Push both girls and boys to get out where they can run and jump and climb and roll without being told to settle down? Skip the nightly bath, and try a nightly walk instead? Maybe not all of the time, but probably a little more often. And for our girls, maybe even a little more often than that.
A new study finds only about half of all parents take their preschoolers outside to play daily, and parents of girls take them out even less often.