TUESDAY, Sept. 4, 2001 (HealthDayNews) -- In these days of video games, the Internet and cable television, it may seem that kids are spending most of their lives parked in front of a screen. Not so, say researchers who found that around the world, and even in the United States, the average child gets at least 90 minutes of exercise each day.
"We found that children are getting greater amounts of activity than people actually thought," says study co-author James Roemmich assistant professor of pediatrics at the State University of New York at Buffalo.
But there's no guarantee that your child is one of the fit ones, so experts recommend that you stay vigilant. "There are too many kids sitting at home," says Richard Cotton, a physiologist and spokesman for the American Council on Exercise.
The research looked at 26 worldwide studies of 1,900 children, ages 3 to 17, who wore heart-rate monitors for at least eight hours a day.
The findings appear in the September issue of Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
The researchers found that kids typically engaged in 30 minutes of high-intensity activity and more than 60 minutes of low-intensity activity each day.
Low-intensity exercise "would be equivalent to things like walking around, walking to a friend's house, Frisbee -- just real light activities that aren't going to make you sweat, but it's not standing around, it's not being sedentary. It is actual activity," Roemmich says.
High-intensity activities get the heart going fast enough to create aerobic benefits to the body, such as bicycling, shoveling snow, shooting baskets and games like dodge ball and hopscotch, he says.
"Generally, children get most of their activity from play, while adolescents get most of their activity through organized sports either in school or out of school," Roemmich says.
The findings were similar in a number of countries, including France, Belgium, Singapore and Ireland, and he says, "The kids in the United States were getting as much activity as the kids in Europe."
Roemmich suggests that medical experts use the findings to boost the daily recommended amount of activity for children to reflect what kids are actually doing. While many experts recommend only 30 minutes a day of exercise, he says, "We need to think about recommendations of 60 to 120 minutes of activity per day for children."
But Cotton, the American Council on Exercise spokesman, says parents need to be careful when encouraging their children to be active, especially the younger ones. "I would just caution against working kids out at higher heart rates, because then it becomes more programmed exercise, and young children really aren't ready for the monotony and the attention challenge it takes to exercise."
Parents should push for less strenuous exercise in younger children, Cotton says. "Parents can have reward systems and say, 'You can play the video came if you want, but it's got to be after you've been doing something physically active for at least 45 minutes'."
Cotton says parents shouldn't forget that even if children are active, many are also overweight. "They may be drinking Cokes instead of water, and junk food," he says. "They're eating worse than ever before."
It's up to moms and dads to show their kids that exercise and healthy eating go together, he says.
What To Do: The American Council on Exercise has some suggestions about how to get your teen to exercise. And Project Fit America, a nonprofit group, works to encourage kids to exercise.
