According to a 2024 report from ParticipACTION, a Canadian non-profit charitable organization encouraging people to get healthy by getting active, just 39 per cent of children and youth aged five to 17 in Canada meet the physical activity recommendation of at least 60 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous activity per day.
What are the barriers to Canadian youth being more physically active and what can schools do to overcome them are some of the questions that will be raised at the upcoming public symposium hosted by the Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education at the University of Toronto on December 3.
Moderated by media personality Donovan Bennett, the symposium, called Fit for the future: Are schools dropping the ball on physical activity, will feature experts and advocates for sport and movement opportunities for children and youth, including KPE Professor Simon Darnell.
Darnell is director of KPE’s Centre for Sport Policy Studies and has produced the 2024 Change the Game research report in partnership with the MLSE Foundation, aimed at understanding sport, physical activity and play-related access, engagement and equity issues for youth across Ontario.
We caught up with him recently for a sneak peek into his research on this topic.
What has your research revealed about the reasons why fewer Canadian children and youth are physically active?
For the past three years, we have supported the MLSE Foundation in conducting the largest ever Pan Ontario surveys about youth and their sports participation and experiences. What we have learned clearly through this research is that youth have specific reasons that they participate in sports and they have things they want from their sports experiences. Youth have told us they want sports experiences that are fun, led by coaches that look like them, easily accessible, and where they can be with their friends. When these elements go missing, youth participation in sports goes down.
What role has COVID-19 played in the drop of physical activity in this population?
What COVID-19 did was exacerbate the existing inequalities within the youth sports system. So, the young people who were well embedded in the sports system and supported by the familial and systemic resources needed to sustain participation, likely continued on in sports post-Pandemic. But the young people who were already feeling on the margins, or were in a relatively precarious position in sports relative to others, were more likely to drop out and not return. It’s those kids that we should be working now to bring back into sports.
From your perspective, as a researcher, how can we counteract this trend?
It sounds simple (though it’s not always) but I think the path forward is to remind ourselves consistently about what young people want from sports and make those experiences available, as opposed to projecting adult-created narratives, goals or outcomes onto them. Instead of the idea of ‘sports are good for you’ we could approach participation from the question: what do you want or need from sports? The answers to that latter question are usually, as we have come to see, fairly straight forward and are built on elements that we, as a sports sector, are actually well positioned to deliver to young people.
Interested in learning more? Reserve your seat for the panel discussion at the Goldring Centre for High Performance Sport on December 3 at 6 p.m.