Only about one in five young Finnish children get enough sleep and exercise while staying within recommended screen time guidelines, according to a new study exploring how well 3-4-year-old children adhere to World Health Organization (WHO) recommendations.
The good news, however, is that kids in Finland seem to be getting enough sleep. The Sunrise Finland study found that 95 percent of participating children met the WHO's sleep recommendations for ages 3–4 of 10 to 13 hours.
In contrast, the daily screen time recommendation of no more than one hour was met by only half of the children, according to Elina Engberg, the project leader of the Sunrise Finland study at the Folkhälsan Research Center.
"The average screen time among the children in the study was 1 hour and 20 minutes. But the variation was significant — some children had no screen time at all, while others spent several hours a day on screens.
The study also indicated that young boys in Finland are far more physically active than girls. Over 70 percent of boys met the physical activity recommendations, while just under half of the girls achieved the guidelines.
Engberg said this result is consistent with previous studies.
"These results are based on motion sensor data, so there's a real measurable difference. Children of this age tend to be naturally very active, so what could be the reason for this discrepancy? Are boys encouraged to be more active than girls, or do girls tend to have hobbies that involve less movement?"
Socioeconomics at play
The higher the education level of the parents, the better all the WHO recommendations were met by the children in the family. Kids living in cities were also more likely to meet the recommendations compared to their rural counterparts.
"Children in rural areas had more screen time and spent more time being sedentary while travelling in vehicles than those in urban areas settings," Engberg explained.
The findings also indicate that children living in rural areas have higher rates of obesity than those in cities.
The Sunrise study involves a total of 64 countries, with Finland among the first to finalise data collection, according to Engberg, who said there appear to be significant differences between the participating states.
The physical activity results were derived from motion sensors placed on the children's waists. Children's physical activity was measured over seven days using two motion sensors, one worn on the child's wrist and the other on their waist. Other results are based on responses from caregiver questionnaires.
More than 1,000 children and 1,500 guardians from Finland took part in the research.