Physical activity is constant and worrying decline for decades in children. Switzerland has the ambition to upgrade physical activity and promote it at a young age.
Not to be confused with the sport, physical activity is characterized by efforts inducing greater energy expenditure than that recorded at rest. But the current lifestyles of industrialized societies makes sedentary children and captives of all kinds of screens that constantly stimulate their minds rather than their bodies. omnipresent screens, increasing use of motorized transport …: these mutations reduce the amount of physical activity and increase daily passivity time, making both adults and young children increasingly inactive.
Spurred works and Canadian recommendations on limiting television time for the benefit of physical activity, French-speaking Switzerland took too aware of the health risks related to the phenomenon. Recently, it is enriched by publications on pediatric specificities.
You said “sport”?
In this fight against immobility, sport and its rules are inadequate procession to the smallest. Too intense competition and performance are not always suited to their abilities or their needs. We forget too often, but physical activity is instead a dynamic exercise accessible to everyone, including babies as soon as they are old enough to move. Until the age of three, keep children away from screens and encourage, about three hours a day playing ground, crawl or walk to their needs and already installed good habits of physical activity. From the age of three years and in the following years, adapted physical activity (jumping jacks, outdoor games, extra-curricular activities, ball games, cycling …), limiting the use of motorized transport and the time before the screens (1h / day maximum of 3 to 4 years and 2 hours / day with a maximum of 5 to 6 years), reinforces the achievements (especially among boys). Start early and keep an activity appropriate to the child’s age: this is how to create a virtuous circle, especially if the living space is secure and if the presence of other children creates a positive emulation.
As a parent, such a child
A favorable context: it does not need more to give the flavor of movement to smaller, even before they enter school. But to conjugate the verb “move” collectively we can not dispense with the role of adults, teachers, child care workers, family, but especially parents. Early models for their children, parents influence their offspring decisively. With their encouragement, their physical, logistical and organizational participation in physical activities, they positively guide their children – especially younger ones – to an active lifestyle generator esteem.
Another point which parents should be alert: the behavior of children, who by nature spend a few seconds in the same activity before changing. An attitude in which disjointed appearance may suggest, wrongly, that excessive agitation and anarchic animates them and they are “active enough” during the day. However, this does not imply a physical activity rates really enough.
Early and future benefits of physical activity
No doubt prefer a sedentary lifestyle the recognized benefits of regular physical activity is an approach that pays. The list of health benefits is long: preventing obesity and many diseases, improving the quality of physical, cognitive and motor, bone health, psychosocial, cardiometabolic and mental improvement in school performance, etc. .
And investment scope does not stop there: the good habits instilled early by seniors find their long-term extension. They are likely to lay the foundations of physical activity of the future adult. Better yet, they allow the subsequent mobilization of motor skills acquired early in the activities of “sport welfare” that bring pleasure.