It may sound strange, but we know very little about children’s physical activity (PA) in daycare and nurseries. How physically active are children really? What instigates PA?
How is PA related to learning, children’s emotions and social relationships? In Finland, we monitor children’s PA nationally with random sampling, including all activities during the day. In this article, I describe some of our findings from our project’s 2015 data collection with 60,454 observations.
The first finding was that children were highly physically active on average for 47.5 minutes, between 8am and 4pm. More importantly, physical activity varied substantially across groups. In the least physically active group, children were highly physically active for only 4.8 minutes per day, while in the most active group this rose to 163 minutes.
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