How Active Play Can Boost Young Brains

It isn't really news that children learn better and think better if they move around. It's something most of us have observed in one way or another. Developmental psychologists have confirmed this common sense observation with a study finding that children, even overweight children, get higher scores on math tests if they take a walk first. Other studies have found that children who get more aerobic exercise have better developed brains, especially the parts of the brain that are important for complex reasoning, and physical fitness has been found to be correlated to academic performance.

All the studies of physical activity and intellectual developmental were either short-term or correlational, until a group of pediatricians studied 221 children aged 7 to 9 who were either put in an after-school physical activities program for 9 months or on a wait list.

Focusing On Seven- To Nine-Year-Olds

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign researchers focused on children aged 7 to 9, in the first to third grades, because previous studies had found that children of that age typically make their greatest gains in executive function, the ability to impose order on their thinking. Executive functions are essential for planning, organizing, strategizing, remembering and understanding details, and managing time and space. These abilities help children, and adults, focus on important details, ignore extraneous stimulation, and maintain concentration. Children who develop executive function at this age usually do well in the rest of their schooling, and children who fail to develop executive function at this age usually struggle for the rest of their academic careers and in life.

The research doctors wanted to find out if physical education could increase the development of executive function in this age group. They secured commitments from the families of 220 children to participate in an after-school exercise program for one school year. They brought all 220 children to the campus for physical fitness and executive function testing, and then they enrolled 110 children in their afternoon program, called FITKids, and put the other 110 children on a wait list as a control group.

Wild, Childish Play Stimulates The Brain

Every day after school for the next nine-month school year, the 110 children were bussed to the university campus for what a New York Times reporter described as "structured bouts of wild, childish play." The children were fitted with heart rate monitors and pedometers to measure improvements in physical fitness. They were taught games that resembled tag, and tutored in motor skills, such as bouncing a soccer ball (football) on the feet and dribbling a basketball.

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Not every child attended every session every day, but most of the children got 70 minutes of exercise in each 2-hour session, walking and running an average of 2 miles (3.2 km) every day. The children weren't allowed to collapse; the children had 50 minutes for getting ready and for taking breaks during each session.

How Much Difference Does Daily Exercise Make For Kids?

At the end of the school year, all 220 children were brought back to the university for testing. The doctors measured maximum O2 (oxygen) consumption (if you are pedaling a bike as hard as you can, how much oxygen do you breathe every minute) as a surrogate for physical fitness. They gave all of the children a test called the P3-ERP to measure electrical activity in their brains. And they gave all of the children tests of executive function requiring the ability to inhibit premature responses to questions and a flexibility task, measuring their ability to "think outside the box."

Better Brain Development, Less Body Fat

In addition to these three tests, the researchers took standard physical measurements.

They also had better physical fitness, as measured by the O2 consumption test, more brain activity, and better scores on the tests of "attentional inhibition," the ability to block out extraneous information while performing a task, and "cognitive flexibility," the ability to toggle between two tasks as needed during a test exercise.

The children who had attended the most exercise sessions had the greatest improvements in their scores, in both physical fitness and executive function. The children who were not in the after-school program also experienced brain development, but not as much as the children who got 2 hours of exercise nearly every school day.

Physical Education Makes Success In Reading And Math Possible

Dr.  Charles Hillman, a professor of kinesiology and community health at the University of Illinois who led the study, says that the bottom line of their findings is that kids need to be physically active for the sake of their brains as well as for their physical fitness. Fancy equipment is not needed, although the participation of a physical education instructor is a good idea. Schools all over the United States that are cutting back on physical education to save money are making a poor choice, Hillman says, because children do better in reading and math when they get at least an hour of physical play every day.

But the physical activity that helps young brains develop does has to be performed on an almost daily basis, with an emphasis on aerobic exercise rather than resistance training or muscle coordination.

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It's great to have an after-school program for your children, but what if you don't? Here are some suggestions.

• Encourage outdoor play every day. Physical play should come first, before video games, Internet, and TV. Make television viewing a family activity. Children will be less likely to be exposed to inappropriate programs, and more likely to develop broader interests.
• There's an app to help parents make sure their children get enough play. TapTrak can help parents keep track of how long children were on the playground, how long they played video games or browsed online, how long they spent on computer games, and how long they spent on their homework.
• Don't schedule every minute. Children at this age need to structure their own play time--and that doesn't mean they need to make little charts to hang in their bedrooms. Spontaneous play helps brains grow at this age. Let kids be kids, but let them be kids on the playground at least an hour a day.