Anu-Katriina Pesonen has taken issue with new recommendations issued in Finland whereby 8 year olds should be engaging in three house of varied physical activity daily. As acting professor in clinical child psychology at the University of Helsinki, she says the guidelines don’t leave enough room for emotional and cognitive development opportunities, which are equally important for children’s wellbeing.
Pesonen says that the seemingly insignificant exchanges that take place between families in everyday situations are far-reaching in their significance.
“We need moments like this too, when children can enjoy interaction and feel a closeness to their family, even after the toddler years,” she says.
As a mother of two grown children herself, she know that busy mums and dads these days are hard pressed to find the time between everyday work and activities for idle time.
“Parents are under tremendous pressure to fulfil the changing definition of a good parent. Their sense of guilt just grows when new guidelines about how they should be parenting are raining down on them all the time,” she says.
The previous recommendations regarding small children’s physical activity in Finland said two hours a day was sufficient. The new guidelines were bumped up to three hours, but the working group responsible for the changes says this timeframe also includes more peaceful forms of movement like walking or balancing.
Exercise or interaction
Pesonen has researched children’s exercise habits herself, and she has no doubt that the new guidelines are well justified and meet today’s needs, especially now that children are increasingly abandoning outside play for indoor screens.
“Nevertheless my first thought was to the amount of time there is available. It is dangerous to think that a day is a never-ending resource. Three hours is one-fifth of a child’s waking hours. Exercise shouldn’t have priority over everything else,” she says.
The importance of physical well-being is undisputed and physical activity has been proven to be just as effective as drugs in depression treatment, for example. But Pesonen says that small children don’t have the same threshold as adults when it comes to physical activity, so it shouldn’t be elevated above other facets of their lives.
She says the foundation of all well-being is based on a child’s emotional and cognitive development, which leads to good interpersonal relationships and self-regulatory thinking.
The professor admits that exercise is an easy quantifier of well-being because it is easy to measure and fulfils people’s need to be provided with clear directions.
“But there is stiff competition for a child’s time these days: music develops the brain, arts develop creativity, reading aloud develops language skills, etc. How can we combine all of these things in a structured rational package, if exercise holds a superior position?
Full-in sports can be too absorbing
The western world has succumbed to a fitness and wellness boom in the last few years, and Pesonen says this is also reflected in our children. Time spent reading was valued in the past, but today it is time spent sporting or otherwise on the go that is most desired.
Pesonen says too much sports and fitness can sometimes be detrimental to a child’s language and interaction development. If children devote a lot of their young life to just one area, as teenagers they may find themselves in a situation where the floor drops out from under them when they can no longer compete. Coping with their new life conditions can be more difficult if other areas of their life have been neglected.
“Learning may have been a secondary pursuit and the child’s autonomous ability may be stunted. It is quite a blow if everything is dependent on one card and then things don’t work out. Then one has to rediscover one's belief in one's own ability to complete tasks and reach goals in new realms.”