Sporting skills: losing them

Australians love their sport – or do they just love watching it? Most children are unskilled at basic movements, such as throwing a ball, running, and jumping, says a Canberra Times article.

According to a study undertaken in the state of New South Wales (in eastern Australia), children lack fundamental movement skills due to their increasing sedentary lifestyle. The study also claims that parents believe that children naturally accumulate sporting skills. The report says otherwise: children need to be taught them.

Louise Hardy, the study leader, said that less than half of New South Wales schools conducted the recommended period of exercise suggested by the education department. Without basic movement skills, children were less likely to participate in sport, had lower fitness levels, and were more prone to being overweight, said the study published in the international journal, Pediatrics. In turn, the cycle of inactivity further reduced movement skills.

The report on physical activity in government primary schools, released last month by the Audit Office of New South Wales, estimated that 30% of primary schools did not deliver two hours of planned sport each week, and that students’ physical activity had declined “significantly.” The study of nearly 7,000 students in NSW, from Year 2 to secondary school, assessed skills in a range of sporting activities. Although children should have mastered a basic sprint run, a vertical jump, a side gallop, and leap by Year 2, the study found that only 10% of assessed children had all four skills.

Half the students had not mastered a sprint run by secondary school, while secondary school-aged girls also showed low competency in the object-control skills of throwing, kicking, and catching a ball or object. Furthermore, physiological differences between the sexes did not explain why boys out-performed girls in some skill areas because they were assessed on movement and control, and not speed and strength.

Louise Hardy suggested that not only were schools not allocating the recommended time for physical activity, but that a sedentary life was the probable cause of the decline in children’s motor skills. Parents should also play with their children in a range of sporting activities: “they should be giving their kids a ball, not a DVD,” she said.

(http://www.essentialkids.com.au/younger-kids/kids-development/sedentary-lifestyles-robbing-kids-of-motor-skills-20120727-22yu3.html#utm_source=FD&utm_medium=lifeandstylepuff&utm_campaign=motorskills)