It's time Irish children took a screen break

THREE-QUARTERS of nine-year-olds in Ireland don’t get the level of exercise recommended by the World Health Organisation for healthy development.

The key findings of the Growing Up in Ireland longitudinal study, published on Friday, provide stark evidence of how our sedentary lifestyles begin at such an early age.

The fact that one in every four nine-year-olds is overweight may not come as a surprise. But the revelation that only 31 per cent of boys and 21 per cent of girls were physically active for at least 60 minutes on each of the previous seven days is among the more striking first findings from the study of 8,500 nine-year-olds, their parents and their teachers. Four per cent of them had not achieved that level of exercise on any of the previous seven days.

When asked what activities they had taken part in with their parents the previous week, the most frequent answer was watching television together (89 per cent).

What nine-year-olds have to say both about sport and television gives parents plenty to think about. The sedentary nature of their lives is exacerbated by the access they have to screens of one sort or another (see panel opposite).

The obsession boys have with sport is not translated into extensive participation, as seen from the levels of physical activity. Some 84 per of them are members of a sports or fitness club, yet this does not compensate for the lack of unorganised sport in their lives.

Two-thirds of nine-year-olds watch between one and three hours of television every day, yet only 4 per cent said it was their favourite past-time. In fact, the favourite past-time is “hanging about with friends”, as chosen by 35 per cent of them. There is a clear disconnect between what children want to do and what they actually do.

Prof Sheila Greene of the Children’s Research Centre in Trinity College, Dublin, co-directed the study. “It is interesting that the nine-year-olds are saying this,” says Greene. “We have studies of teenagers saying hanging out with friends is most important for them but for nine-year-olds it is also very important. I would not have necessarily anticipated that.

“It is an important piece of information about what kids like to do for parents who are busy structuring every minute of the day,” she suggests – particularly middle-class parents. “Parents think that it is maybe a waste of time and don’t value it.”

For most nine-year-olds watching television has become the default thing to do, perhaps because there is nothing else accessible to them.

“When you have all these boys interested in sport, maybe what they would love to be doing is kicking a football with their pals rather than sitting watching another episode of The Simpsons,” says Greene.

However, she is concerned at the dominance of sport among boys. Half of them want to be professional sportsmen when they grow up. “Boys are getting sport from every source. They seem to read sport magazines, they look at the internet, they follow it on TV and in the papers, everywhere they can get it I think.

“It is not about playing football as such; it is watching it, talking about it, reading about it, identifying with your team and getting the team jersey and putting posters on your wall. It is something about tribal identity; rivalry between the teams or else being a fan of the cool team of the moment in your school.

“It is very narrowing of boys’ interests and that happens early,” Greene says. “The more bookish child is seen as a nerd and is rejected.” While two-thirds of girls are involved in cultural activities such as music, drama and dance, only one-third of boys are.

The fact the interest boys have in sport does not result in high levels of physical activity is particularly disappointing. Greene attributes this not only to the cooped-up lifestyles of today’s children but also to the fact sport is undervalued in the school system.

This study shows nine-year-olds do an average of one hour of physical education a week at school compared with, say, 2.3 hours on religious studies.

“Many schools don’t have fields or even yards where they can run around in and when they get home, they’re constrained by the amount of building that has been done on green spaces,” says Greene.

“Even rural kids often don’t have access to the outdoors in a very healthy manner and I think we haven’t been doing enough to make sure children have spaces to play in an active way in the past number of years. They used to be there naturally, as it were, and they are not there anymore and we have to make more effort to provide for this. The study provides evidence that they are not getting enough active play.”

The provision of extensive, research-based evidence is what this Government-commissioned longitudinal study is all about. Led by researchers from Trinity College Dublin and the Economic and Social Research Institute, Growing Up in Ireland is following the progress of two groups of children: the 8,500 nine-year-olds featured in this release of key findings and also 10,000 nine-month-olds. There will be two rounds of research with each group of children – the nine-year-olds will be re-interviewed at age 13.

The idea is that this information will be used to assist in forming Government policy and in the provision of services, aimed at giving all children the best possible start in life. Even the initial findings highlight a marked disadvantage for children being raised in lower socio-economic circumstances.

To critics who argue that this type of study is a waste of money and that all available funds should go directly to children, Greene says it provides research-informed evidence to base policy on, “instead of moving around in the dark based on anecdotal evidence or whatever comes to notice. So hopefully, ultimately, it will make sure money is not misspent.”

While this is the first such study in Ireland, the UK started gathering data about childhood this way in 1946 and is currently planning its fifth national cohort study. The director of the Centre for Longitudinal Studies at the Institute of Education in the University of London, Prof Heather Joshi, says there is a lot of folklore about what makes a good childhood and a happy home and research such as this can confirm it or bust the myth.

Since these longitudinal studies track the same people through their lives, they show how histories of health, wealth, education, family and employment affect outcomes and achievements in later life. Their findings have informed debates in a number of policy areas in Britain over the last half-century including: education and equality of opportunity; poverty and social exclusion; gender differences in pay and employment; and changing family structures.

Child poverty has proven to be “a pretty tough nut to crack”, says Joshi. Policies formulated as a result of this kind of research are moderating the effect of increasing inequalities in opportunity, she says, if not yet bringing about all the hoped-for improvements.

The longer you follow the children in these studies, the more powerful they are in disentangling what is going on, she adds. Her own latest published research focused on the effect on children of mothers going out to work and, unlike earlier studies, she found it now caused neither a disadvantage nor a benefit. “It all depends on how they are being looked after.”

Growing Up in Ireland found that just over half of all mothers of nine-year-olds are working principally outside the home. One-third of mothers believe work commitments adversely affect the amount of time they can spend with their families.

One half of fathers feel the same – but considering mothers work an average of 27 hours a week outside the home, while for fathers it is 47 hours per week, this figure is relatively low. Ninety per cent of the children studied say they would talk to their mother about a problem, but only 61 per cent would consult their father.

In terms of family relationships, Greene says Ireland is doing well. More than 80 per cent of nine-year-olds say they get on “very well” with their parents and siblings. “The good relationship with parents seems to be very positive and the amount of contact with extended family, grandparents and other relatives seems unusual in the context of other European countries as far as we know at this moment, with the caveat that we have not examined it yet very systematically.” However she warns there is a significant minority of kids who don’t feel that way and this is something that must be examined.

Four styles of parenting were explained in simple terms to the nine-year-olds. A majority (77 per cent) identified their parents as authoritative – showing a high level of control combined with a high level of support, in a way that is regarded as best for children.

John Sharry, psychotherapist and co-developer of the Parents Plus programme, says the authoritative approach is best “because it is not enough just to be a loving, caring parent, you need also to be able accept the role as a parent”. Parents have to take responsibility for setting rules and maintaining boundaries, he says. “That has the best outcome for children; they grow up being close to their parents but their parents are their parents.”

In the findings on how mothers discipline their children, Sharry is pleased to see only 20 per cent regularly or always use shouting, while 88 per cent “discuss/explain why the behaviour is wrong”. (Although perhaps these responses, more than any other, beg the question were some of these mothers giving politically correct answers, rather than saying what they actually do?)

“I am not surprised that explaining is a popular option for discipline,” says Sharry. “It is a good one but I would be cautious about using it all the time. It’s not all about agreement with your children but also having authority. It’s about a range of tactics, that’s the key thing.”

At the other end of the scale, almost a fifth of nine-year-olds labelled their parents as permissive, while 6 per cent of fathers and 2 per cent of mothers were classed as neglectful.

“Where there is a high level of negative parenting styles, that is a problem for kids,” says Greene. “The fact that 6 per cent of them say their fathers are neglectful. When you think what that means in that child’s life... It is a small minority but still a significant number of children who are not having the childhood they should have,” she adds. “Those are the families that need help.”

Screening your child's activities

THE INSIDIOUS invasion of various types of screens into bedrooms is the most worrying aspect of the way nine-year-olds are embracing the electronic age.

In Britain, where this trend has been highlighted by statistics for years, parenting author Sue Palmer says the biggest, single improvement parents could could make is to get television screens out of the bedroom.

The Growing Up In Ireland study shows:

- Forty per cent of nine-year-olds have a TV in their bedroom

- Just under 7 per cent have a computer in their bedroom

- Nearly half (45 per cent) have their own mobile phone

This changes their way of interacting, says the study’s co-director Prof Sheila Greene.

While 65 per cent of the children typically spend one to three hours a day watching television, for 9 per cent the figure is three to five hours a day.

You can add to that around an hour a day playing video games (44 per cent) or using the computer

(51 per cent).

The gender divide

EVEN AT nine years of age, life is markedly different for girls and boys.

According to the first key findings of the Growing Up in Ireland study, girls are busy helping out with the cooking and the cleaning around the house, while boys are putting the bins out.

Some of the time boys spend obsessing about sport, girls are using to read and they generally show more interest in education.

The fact that 85 per cent of nine-year-olds are taught by women no doubt goes some way to explaining why 22 per cent of girls want to be a primary school teacher when they grow up but only 2 per cent of boys aspire to the same job.

The study’s co-director, Prof Sheila Greene, found this striking. If you ask parents if they treat their children differently depending on whether they’re girls or boys, they’ll say no, she says. “People often say: ‘There is no difference now is there?’ However, those patterns seem to be quite clear.”

Of most concern for girls is their even lower level of physical activity compared to the boys and the fact they are more likely to be classified as overweight (22 per cent compared to 17 per cent of boys) or obese (8 per cent compared to 6 per cent of boys).

In Britain, where the figures for overweight children are even higher, it is boys rather than girls who are more likely to be obese, according to its national child measurement scheme.

“The gendering of the relationship to sport and physical activity is starting very early and there would be a concern on that side,” says Greene. Only 21 per cent of girls engage in the recommended amount of exercise.

Traditional gender differences are also highlighted among parents. For instance, only 2 per cent of nine-year-olds say their father is looking after the home. While 16 per cent of the children surveyed live in lone-mother households, only 1 per cent live with just their father.

For more see growingup.ie