Do your children get 60 mins of active time a day? Add your comment and you could win a £100 voucher - NOW CLOSED

[AnnMumsnet]

We've been asked by the team at Seara to find out if (and how) your children (aged 5-18) (and other children you know) are getting the full recommended 60 minutes of physical activity a day?

For guidelines see the NHS Choices site

Please share your thoughts and experiences on this thread. Please also share your tips for what you do to encourage your DC's to be active - or what you do with your DC's to get them active?

Share your tips etc on this thread and you'll be entered into a prize draw where one MNer will win a £100 Love2Shop voucher.

We do recognise that, for various reasons, not all children (or adults) are able to reach the target of 60 minutes of exercise per day - and that 'exercise' can mean different things for different people. If this is the case for your child, do also feel free to share your experiences about how you encourage physical activity in ways that are consistent with their capacities.

thanks and good luck
MNHQ

Also: Seara are running a "Grassroots To Greatness Competition" at the moment: enter your childs' football team into the competition for their chance to win a Seara football sponsorship for next season - worth £3,000! More details here www.seara.co.uk

40 mins on the school journey/back each day.
They get 2 hrs in the park once or twice a week, an hour of sports clubs, scouts often do physical things, plus the play in the garden/park at weekends.

But its lovely to have a duvet day sometimes

Yes, they do, on the whole, inspite of not doing anything worthy like walking to school (rural roads, not safe, 3.5 miles). DS does 90 minutes of sport, minimum, every school day. DD does something active for 90 minutes every school day, but sometimes that is drama rather than PE. OTOH she is home earlier and more likely to be out on the trampoline /climbing frame. At weekends, both are out, running races or playing cricket, and they both ride.

Tips? Definitely a trampoline if you have room. Otherwise, a general expectation that a tennis ball = outdoor entertainment. It's cheap and portable and provides a variety of games.

my 5 year old walks home from school every day which takes about ten mins. he has half hour swimming lesson on a Tuesday and an hours football on a Monday. he plays on the trampoline for a good while after school most nights. we swim once a week together and try to do something active on a Saturday which could be the park, bike ride or soft play. Sundays are generally a walk. I still think he watches too much tv though.
my 12 year old is a lazy so and so. we have always encouraged him to exercise and he does football athletics and wrestling as well as walking to and from school (half an hour) but he very rarely will do anything which is not a group activity. Once in a while he will come swimming or a bike ride. I do however force him out sometimes but generally he rides his bike to his friends 3 miles away and sits in his house with him on the x box!
my 16 year old is currently a gym bunny. she goes most days. she has always gone to athletics but again would never go out and play unless it was an organised activity. she plays rounders once a week with me.
When we were younger we played in the street for hours with other kids but due to numerous factors this doesn't seem to happen too much anymore x

overall I think yes they are but I guess there are some days that they are less active. Even at home my son is always on the move jumping from sofa to sofa and spinning around so I think most the time it does add up to 60 mins. They have easy access to the garden and on dry days they head out there with a football.

Approx 2-3 times a week we add in a trip to the park so that helps too.

I think the biggest lack of exercise comes on a rainy weekend day when it is all to easy to sit home and watch a film or watch TV or do the computer for most the day!

BTW, I agree that responses will be self-selecting, and also that it is all too easy to imagine how this could be hard /impossible for some parents to achieve. We have outside space in which DC don't need to be constantly supervised. Their school has oodles of space and an ethos of lots of sport (and is independent so not constrained by short school days and NC). After school care had access to all the aforementioned space, and uses it. If many of these circumstances were different, my DC would not be doing 60 minutes a day. They are not naturally energiser bunnies, and would quite happily slob in front of screens. They only feel the lack of fresh air and exercise if they don't get it because they are so used to it. It wouldn't take long before they wouldn't miss it at all.

Easily. I'd say it was more like 2-3 hrs. Walk to school and back is 1 hr; play; PE; cross country running at lunch-time; various sports clubs after school; weekend and summer evening walks after dinner. My 12 yr old daughter is quite sporty though. Her 8 yr old sister isn't naturally so but still does a fair bit. She does walk there and back to school (30 mins round trip), does ballet and swimming weekly; PE at school, weekend and evening walks. Both girls love the trampoline and at this time of year are on it for at least 30 mins a night. Both girls are brilliant (though moan a little for the first hour) at mountain walking but this is because we've always done that as a family and I think have developed strong leg muscles/stamina which helps make the daily stuff easier.

My two get it most days. They have sports clubs that are at least an hour long 4 days a week and they play football/ other sport at every opportunity both at home and during break/ lunch times at school. The only times they might not are when it's raining.

Well, my girls attend active classes after school & do PE at school. They do play in the garden after school when the weather is nice, so I think they get the exercise they need in the Summer months but in the winter I don't think their activities alone give them quite enough exercise.

Very easily! My ds5 is one educated and never still! He also does forest school, trampolining, gym, dance, swimming...... My dd 15 walks/runs for over 2 hours a day and dances 3 times a week, also swims every other day and runs around after her brother!

My DS (16) has been revising hard for exams since the football season finished, so he certainly hasn't been doing an hour of exercise daily in the past few weeks. Some days he hasn't even left the house! I do kick him out for a dog walk every now and then, but I am simply leaving him alone for the time being.
However, when GCSEs are over, he can't wait to be meeting up with his mates to kick a football around all day.
By being football addicts it has been easy to encourage him to exercise daily, I recommend the sport for all children! It's all weather, all terrain, both genders.

We've signed up our DSs up for a variety of activities as well as a 15 min walk/run each way to school every day.

They do football, rugby, swimming each week and spend every waking moment leaping around too!

I haven't really added it up.

Most days I will walk ds (9) to school. The walk takes us around 20 minutes there and 20 minutes (I do this 4 times a day!) so that's 40 minutes and 2 miles walked most days.

ds has 2 PE lessons a week which keeps him active for an hour whilst dd (12) has 3 lessons a week.

The biggest obstacle to exercise at home is homework. ds is supposed to read every day after school and also has separate maths and English homework to do. dd gets an awful lot of homework and so she works in her room from 3.30 - 4.30pm.

I do encourage them to play out and if dh has time he will have a 15min kickabout with ds. dd will sometimes walk half a mile to the shop or will go round the park with neighbours.

Just recently we made them some stilts and got the garden toys out so they were playing with their hoppers, stilts and so on in the garden.

Winter will be harder.

I've two boys, aged 5 and 9, and they get their exercise by being obsessed with football!
It's straight in from school, and straight outside to play with their ball. They also go to a football club once a week, and have swimming lessons as in my opinion, swimming is a vital life skill as well as a fun sport that keeps them active.
They never stop running about. They make me feel tired just watching them.

ds2 and ds3 do quite a lot of sport at school and also quite a lot of organised activities outside school. Dance, martial arts, swimming, fencing. I sometimes get them surf lessons They scooter and trampoline in the garden and are always keen to play football so if I think they're been sitting around too long I send them up to the park to play footy with dh.

DS1 is a different kettle of fish & much harder to work out how to encourage exercise. He's a teenager and severely autistic. Many activities are simply not open to him (he has no concept of winning/losing games for example, and couldn't play football). He is active at school and he does a lot of swimming (how much is exercise and how much is floating I am not sure). I am keen to keep his weight down as being heavy in combination with challenging behaviours can be problematic. Luckily he loves walking so I always take him dog walking with me, and he also likes surfing & goes year round and he goes through phases of using the trampoline. If I thought he was putting weight on I'd get him out doing longer walks.

Mine get plenty of walking as we have no car - it's about 15 mins each way to school (and hilly).

I do struggle with the rest of the active stuff though and did recently start a thread where I got some good advice. I have a disability so taking them out is difficult - we don't have our own garden to kick them out into and despite being in a culdesac the cars go really fast in and out.

DD (nearly 6) now does 3 after school clubs a week (singing/dance, gym, yoga) so hopefully that is helping, and while she's there DH takes DS (nearly 4) to the park so he gets a good hour of madness at least 3 times a week.

Weekends are the hardest time to achieve 60mins as DH is often working now but I'm trying to manage the odd trip to town (there's another park there) or soft play if my health allows! I really don't want my DCs turning into couch potatoes. They are naturally very fidgety active so they hate being stuck indoors.

We do a minimum of 60 minutes a day, but rarely with structured 'exercise' or sports. Mostly its running to school, running around supermarket, tearing around the garden or house etc. I encourage noisy, active games and it works for my kids. On the weekend we usually head for the park or some sort of open space and let them loose. They are so much happier for it.

On average I'd say they do get an hour a day, perhaps more. Some days they're out playing from dawn until dusk, just coming in for sustenance. Others, it will be just break at school and scooting to and from school, but it averages out to plenty of activity.

Having a large garden with lots of toys and equipment helps, so getting them out and moving isn't something that takes any thought or planning. We kick them out come rain or shine, and we often get up at weekends to find them in pyjamas and wellies having a kick-about.

Scoot to school, Playtime, lunchtime, scoot home, trampoline in the garden, activities thre times a week (martial arts, swimming, dance), bike riding, the park and a walk on weekends probably means yes they do.

What is 'active' though? I wouldn't call being dragged round a supermarket/jumping around the living room active but clearly some do.

It needs better definition. IMO it should mean being out of breath etc.

My dc's usually walk or scoot to school each day, and at the moment spend a lot of time either in the garden playing cricket or on the trampoline after school. At weekends we try to go on a bike ride, play tennis in the park, practice cricket.

My ds plays various sports through clubs and school teams and dd dances and climbs with clubs.

They might not have the same amount of activity each day but I am happy that it evens out over a week.

im four months with hypermessis so also odeama so swimming about at the mo lol

Dd (7) in an average week walks to and from school, plays in garden, plays out in street with friends, walks to and from shops and does 3 x 90min gymnastics training sessions.
At weekends we go for family walks or family swims.
I am happy that she is achieving the minimum requirement

Yes, they walk, run or cycle everywhere. Play times at school, running around after school in playground or garden, swimming lessons and other sporting activities. Build it into daily life and it's easy really.

I doubt my six year old does. He walks to school and back, fifteen to twenty minutes each way, longer if with the childminder but partly because they walk slower. On a school day he does PE and outside play, do I think he makes up another twenty minutes full running around - I could pretend a yes but can't say he definitely does.

Swimming lessons and park trips are at the weekend, but no school run then.

I agree with the comment, it depends on what you class as active. I am considering it to be the equivalent of a cardiovascular workout for adults, rather than 60 minutes not sat on his bum.

My tip for how to increase activity. Where possible walk to school/the park/library.

I would say my kids (7 and 9) do. They walk to and from school, play in the garden whenever it's not raining, do PE twice a week and never walk when they can run. As a family we tend to swim 2/3 times per week and have maybe one or two long park or country walks. DS does Gymnastics, Cubs and Rugby. DD does Gymnastics and Beavers.

Saying that, although they are very strong and flexible, lean and healthy I do think they could both work on their stamina. DS has signed up for a 1 mile run soon and we have been training. So far he has 'had a stitch' and 'hurt his foot'. I was surprised to see that he can't run in a sustained way for more than a couple of minutes.

i suppose a lot of the formal exercise he does also involves a lot of time warming up, queuing and cooling down. Now they are getting bigger, I think its important they maintain fitness habits as well as 'fun' habits. As a family we are trying to do more to encourage this by walking, swimming and cycling together, and DH and I are much better at using our gym memberships

My 9yo DS gets a lot more than 60 minutes a day:

• walking to and from school 2-3 times a week
• playing running games every day at school (lunchtimes etc)
• athletic club 1.5 hours twice a week
• cubs lots of running about
• swimming lessons
• playing outside weather permitting
• weekend/evening family bike rides
• long walks/hikes once or twice a month.

When I right it all down he seems to do a lot, which is just as well as he eats like a horse