What activities do your kids spend time doing? (Owen Franken for The New York Times)How much time does your child spend watching television? Doing chores? Listening to music? Hanging out with you?
To compare your child’s exercise and leisure time to national averages, take the Well Child Activity Quiz.
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15 Comments
“Do exercise, music or video games fill your child’s free time? Take our quiz to see how your kid compares.”
Unfortunately, this quiz seems to have nothing to do with this. You can’t compare “your kid”. (And EXACTLY how should I compare my 6-yr-old to the question about the 9-yr-old?!)
Instead, this is a Guess the Answer quiz. (Guess-the-answer type quizzes seem to have no point - why make the reader go to so much trouble to get the information you want to give them?)
Oh, I quit at question #2, as my guess of 1 hour was 11 minutes off. How ridiculous!
I score this a * on the NY Times 0 to 4 for stars scale.
— Jack EverittFROM TPP — I’m not quite sure how to respond. By seeing what the average child does, it does give you a sense of how your child compares. Personally, I learned my child does pretty well on the TV front (she’s far lower than average) but we have work to do on the chores! I wish we had the technology to give you a personal assessment, but unfortunately we don’t. Still, as a I parent, I find it useful to see what the averages are to gain a better sense of how my child compares.
My 9 yr daughter gets on the public school bus at 8:20 and gets home at 4:05, then does an hour of homework, followed by chores and dinner and is in bed by 9:00 pm. There is almost no time to go outside and play. When I homeschooled my son, at the same age he spend 2 hours doing “school”, then was free to climb trees, go on field trips, hang out with friends, play sports. And he scored far far higher on achievement tests (top 1%). So maybe we can talk about why the public schools have to eat up so much of my child’s time to teach them so little? And then if the kids don’t behave, teachers take away the tiny bit of recess the kids have.
FROM TPP — You know, this is one of my pet peeves too — taking a way a child’s recess as a punishment. How crazy is that? Or keeping a child inside for recess to make up school work — that bugs me too. Especially at the grade school level — recess is incredibly active. To take away the opportunity for exercise in the middle of the school day seems like really poor judgment to me.
— TeresaI have to agree with the first comment — this is not very useful for comparing your child with national averages, it’s a guessing game about “the average 9-yr-old” or “the average 15-yr-old” depending on the specific question. As the previous poster noted, it makes no sense to compare your own child of different age. It’s kind of interesting, but the description here is misleading.
— DeeI have to say I agree with 1 and 3; this was advertised as “compare your child’s exercise and leisure time to national averages” and it is not. Just change it to a better description of the quiz. (How about - “How much do you know about the average American child’s activity levels?”)
Like comment 2, I homeschooled my son. This year he is going to regular high school for the first time, and he has no time for more than maybe a half hour walk in the evening.
— MargaretUnless I want to cut back on his chores (which is unhealthy in a different way), I don’t know when he is supposed to fit in exercise. Plus the days are getting shorter and it will soon be dark when he gets home, and he’s in no mood after a full day of school and with homework looming to be nagged about exercise.
Maybe backing off of the chores would help some, too, depending on what they are. All my life growing up, I really had nothing that I was “expected” to do on a daily basis, other than go to school and do my home work. I had pleanty of time to play outside (maybe too much early on) and work on projects as I got older. I now am living in, running, and fixing up my own house, regulating almost every aspect of it, and going to med school, all while being the only one living there. If you raise your kids right, in my opinion, they will pick up their responsibilities as they need to assume them. It is certainly a good idea to have them help out when help is needed, but I do feel that having pleanty of free time, if used properly, can be a great way to encourage exercise, creativity, etc.
— John-Robert La PortaI have to admit to being confused at first too! I thought I was supposed to answer with what *my* child does, then compare to what other kids do. Turns out we’re supposed to guess what *other* kids do then compare to our own. Well, as my tweenie daughter would say, “What EV-errrrr.”
As for chores, I agree that it would be nice if my kids helped with chores, but in my family dynamic, as I would be willing to bet for many others, it would become just one more power/control issue. Choose your battles! My plan is to “lead by example” by raising my kids in a clean, well-ordered household so that becomes their expectation for how they should lives their lives when they go out on their own. (I do have my 12-year-old daughter do her own laundry, though.)
— IolantheThis quiz helped me because I have a 13-year-old that I worry about — does he get enough outside exercise? Does he play too many video games? And I have twin 3-year-old girls who are coming from an entirely different experience (and have an older mom) that I worry about (the worry part doesn’t change :)
We have struggled with the vid game, chores, how much is appropriate outside, etc. throughout his life and this quiz made me feel better (although I scored in the not so bright category). My son belongs to the middle school soccer team and they practice every day for 2 hours after school. He is not allowed to watch tv or play video games during the week. He is allowed 2 hours of video games on Saturday and Sunday. He is a straight A student, plays in the band, plays on soccer team and tennis on weekend. That being said, he always forgets to do his chores (and I noticed there is no quiz question on how much time it takes for parents to re-do the chores children are assigned :), and we still fight about that video game thing occasionally.
— MelissaNow, has anyone figured out what to do when one twin wants to be outside all the time and the other one wants to be inside all the time. Don’t say nanny unless you can send me one.
One simple device -built-in to our TV sets when I was a kid - would help to cut down on TV time and increase “moving” time: a key. My parents could lock the TV.
“Progress” taken away that possibility!
Alexa Fleckenstein M.D., physician, author.
— Alexa Fleckenstein M.D.#2 Theresa:
I’m curious, why do you choose public school for your daughter if homeschooling worked well for your son?
I agree that recess and physical activity is really important.
— KWhat I notice is that there are more “chunky” kids today than there were when I was a child. Of course we didn’t have homework the way children have it today. I think that taking recess time out of the school day, more than an hour of homework a night, coupled with not enough time to just run around after school is very bad for children. And we had chores. I had to help out in the yard. But, I had enough time to bike some spring evenings, go sledding on weekends, walk to the library in town, and be by myself. Recess didn’t really disappear until 7th grade. We still had gym every weekday so that kept us busy.
If we want children to be active we have to give them time. They should not be driven everywhere. In between meal foods should be fruit, not cookies, not diet foods.
— hen3ryI got to #3 before giving up–this is just a bad way to present information. I would think most readers, especially parents, don’t have the time to waste clicking through several pages to get a couple sentence’s worth of information.
Another problem: some of the questions deliberately separate children of different age groups, and others deliberately lump them together. For some reason, the author of this quiz didn’t find it incongruent to separate youngsters and teenagers in the physical activity category while forcing single statistic on ALL age groups for TV watching.
Look, it doesn’t matter what the “national averages” are. It matters what’s healthy for the children. “Average” families eat oily fast-food for dinner 2-4 times a week–does this mean that should be the standard everyone should try to match? What everyone else is doing is not necessarily what should be done; I’d be more interested in reading medical and dietary professionals’ views to make sure my children are healthy than in playing these “my child is *above average*!” games.
FROM TPP — A quiz is another way to present information. If you don’t find it worthwhile, then don’t take it. As for the information presented, I had to go with what’s available, which is why som eof it focuses on young children and some focuses on teens.
— TamaraYou question about how much time reading makes no sense? extra-curricularly??
In homes where parents travel– two hours per day with child is impossible, and I suspect is overstated– depends on age of style.
Three hours of activity for city children is also wrong. Recess is rare, PE not esp. active, and in the winterit’s dark by 5 or 6, if the kids are allowed outside anyway. (which is why so much diabetes 2.)
Most children’s attention span is about 15 minutes per task (except for things where pixels stimulate/soother?? some part of the neurotransmission in the brain.
I think this is a pretty flawed.questionnaire in terms of the answer, The questions are good.
— Enuffal ReadyAs a parent, I am very frustrated by my neighbors lock down on their kids outdoor time. Kids love to play outside with other kids and lots ot creativity ensues. We live in a neighborhood with cul de sacs and can identify jsut about everyone that lives around us but there is such hysteria from fellow moms about letting 10 year old kids get on their bike and cruise around ! They, in my opinion, are absolute hysterics and the worst kind of helicopter parents; creating anxiety and fear in children without real measurable risk. Instead of getting the kids out of the house, they must, or so I opine, pop some Xanax and turn on the T.V. for the kids when the decibel levels get too high. I am in heaven when my kids are outdoors, getting physical and working off all that energy. It’s a real struggle, however, to find like minded parents these days. I will add, too, that the cloistered kids are often overweight, have some sort of nebulous “behavior problem” and are generally unsocial. Anyone else with this observation ?
— MomWell, I did make it through the entire quiz. I would say some of the confusion stems from the title. I think people are expecting their own children to be assessed. Perhaps it would have been better titled, “Test Your Knowledge of the Average Kid’s Physical Activity”.
That said, I would also take issue with some of the statistics. I also find it hard to believe that most kids get 3 hours of physical activity per day. My own (7 and 10) get 15 minutes of recess per day, and about 2 hours of PE per *week*. Like Teresa/#2’s kids, they are pooped from the long school day (longer than I ever had), so they don’t always run out to play when they get home. Not that they represent the national average, but I would be surprised that they are as far off as the studies say. My kids participate in sports and use but are not addicted to video games and tv, so I would not call them sedentary.
I also got the feeling that all the hours stated in the studies added up to more than could possibly be spent in a day, but maybe I didn’t read the statistics closely enough.
Slightly OT — I live in Houston and we just finished 10 days without power in my neighborhood after Hurricane Ike. The weather was for the most part rather pleasant, and I tried to look at the positive side — without electricity there was nothing to do but read and relax during the day, then go to bed early and get plenty of sleep. The kids played all day outside with neighbors they rarely see. They bicycled up and down the street, played touch football, organized treasure hunts, and just ran noisily through yards. It was a wonderful flashback to the days when our mothers would yell from the back porch in waning light to call us home for dinner. We could all use such a forced break from time to time!
— Huckle CatIf parents would help their kids with their homework and make their chores fun, the kids would have more free time.
— sunshine