The math gender gap is huge in some countries and virtually nonexistent in others, suggesting that social and cultural influences trump biology when it comes to how boys and girls learn arithmetic.

Test scores for girls lagged the most in countries where gender inequities were most pervasive.

“The so-called gender gap in math skills seems to be at least partially correlated to environmental factors,” says economist and study researcher Paola Sapienza, PhD of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. “The gap doesn’t exist in countries in which men and women have access to similar resources and opportunities.”

Gender Gap: Nature vs. Nurture

The question of whether nature or nurture has the bigger impact on why boys seem to do better in math and girls in reading has been studied for decades.

The fact that there is little difference before the teenage years favors the idea that environment plays a bigger role than biology, Sapienza tells WebMD.

The new research, appearing in the May 30 issue of Science, suggests that the opposite is true.

Sapienza and colleagues analyzed the scores of 276,000 teenagers living in 40 countries who took the same standardized tests designed to measure math, reading, science, and problem-solving ability.

When all the scores were combined, boys outscored girls in math by an average of 10 points, and girls outscored boys in reading by almost 33 points.

The researchers assessed cultural views regarding the roles of women and men in each of the countries by reviewing data from established surveys of gender equity.

The surveys asked questions such as “Should women work outside the home?” and “Is it more important for a man to get a college education than a woman?”

In countries with the fewest social and cultural restrictions on women — including Iceland, Sweden, and Norway — math scores for girls were as good as boys or better.

The biggest math score gender gap occurred in Turkey, where girls’ scores lagged behind boys by 23 points. Turkey also scored among the lowest on the gender equity surveys.

The U.S. fell in the middle of the pack, with girls scoring 10 points lower on average in math than boys.

Bridging the Gender Gap

The reading advantage that has been traditionally seen among girls did not appear to be greatly influenced by culture.

In every country girls performed better than boys in reading, but the gap was widest in countries with the fewest gender inequities.

Among boys, the overall scores in math and reading were higher in the countries offering the most advantages to women and lowest in countries offering the least.

“This is important because it shows that advances for girls do not come at the expense of boys,” Sapienza says.

Yale professor of physics and astronomy C. Megan Urry, PhD, tells WebMD that it is clear that cultural influences play a big role in learning. But she adds that gender is just one piece of a complex puzzle.

Urry chairs the department of physics and directs the Yale Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics.

“People make a big deal about the gender gap in mathematics, but the fact is Japanese women are better at mah than American men,” she says.

“Over the last 30 years it has changed a lot, so it is pretty clear that this is more a function of attitudes than physiology,” Urry says.

Source: CBS News, NY
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/05/29/health/webmd/main4136315.shtml

Children who take part in a business education scheme at school go on to earn a third more than their peers and gain critical life skills, research found today.

The findings were welcomed by the Gazette’s finalist in the If We Can, You Can entrepreneurial challenge, Matt Stirland, who yesterday revealed that he planned to take business classes into local secondary schools.

A six-month study by FreshMinds consultancy found that graduates of the Young Enterprise Company Programme were typically earning between £40,000 and £45,000 after they reached the age of 30.

But their classmates who did not take part in the programme, which involves setting up and running a real company with help from a business volunteer, were earning just £26,000 to £30,000.

The research also said that through the scheme, children had developed better skills in areas such as risk-taking, teamwork, presentation and self-motivation. Mr Stirland said these were more important than financial reward.

He said: “Pay doesn’t inspire me, although if people develop business skills the money will follow. The value of schemes like this is that they teach young people how to market a business idea to customers and how to learn from failure.”

Rachael Anderton, the Young Enterprise charity’s deputy chief executive, said that almost six out of 10 pupils who had been on the scheme said they had a “good understanding” of career options when they left school. But only 46% of those who did not take part agreed.

Source: nebusiness.co.uk, UK
http://tinyurl.com/52gqh2

Somewhere between the traffic report and an erectile dysfunction advertisement, John Deeks booms over your breakfast cereal: “Does your two-year-old make careless mistakes? Do they appear to not be listening to you? Does your son crawl around or climb on things? Or is your daughter easily distracted and babbles excessively?”

“If you answered, ‘Yes’ to most of these questions, your baby is suffering from a common case of ADHD and may be in need of the health benefits of Methylphenidate Hydrochloride.”

Now in handy pop-packs for little fingers, it comes in new Dora The Explorer, The Wiggles and Bob the Builder range, perfect for long car trips, shopping trolley tantrums and special occasions like birthdays and Christmas. Consult your local GP today.”

It’s a mock advertisement, of course, but there are scary parallels to reality as we learned yesterday that more than 300 children in NSW alone are using mind-altering drugs before they have even reached school-age - some while still in nappies.

Take those warning signs. They are the official behavioural patterns issued by the health department if you are concerned your child suffers from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Do the following signs apply to your toddler? Having difficulty sustaining attention, not listening, not following through on instructions, getting easily distracted, fidgeting with hands or feet, won’t remain seated, runs about or climbs excessively, won’t be quiet, talks excessively, “blurts answers before questions have been completed”, difficulty taking turns and interrupting.

Really, is there any other kind of two-year-old? Or three-year-old, even four- or five-year-old? The health department list reads like a review of a Hi-5 concert. These are all babyish behaviours - they have not yet had a chance to prove they know any better.

The known side effects of these drugs are sickening when applied to a toddler. Suicidal tendencies, stomach cramps, shortness of breath, heart palpitations, delusions, lack of appetite, nausea, diarrhoea and insomnia.

Narelle King, the mother of a nine-year-old ADHD-diagnosed boy who she says has improved out of sight without medication, said: “It’s appalling. It makes me sick.”

King used the Dore program for her son Lucas, which uses exercises to stimulate the brain without drugs. She was so impressed, after seven months she became program adviser.

While she is “disgusted” by the new figures, she is far from surprised.

“I had a client with a six-month-old who had been prescribed Ritalin. You’ve got to be joking. The baby wasn’t sleeping, it was having trouble settling, and Ritalin is the answer?” she said.

“You’ve got to wonder whether the parents in these cases have exhausted all other options.”

David Hay, who specialises in ADHD at Curtin University, said the figures were too small to be of concern.

“I think the figures are not bad, actually - we’re not doing such a bad job,” Professor Hay said.

“It shows we bend over backwards in Australia to be scrupulous in giving medication to children of this age.”

Stringent the process may be, but we’re talking about a drug that causes children to grow just 2cm in three years - and that’s the older ones.

At the very least, it warrants further examination - you just don’t mess with the heads of babies.

Source: NEWS.com.au, Australia
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,23781648-5007146,00.html

Boys outperform girls on math tests given to children worldwide, but the gender gap is less pronounced in countries where women and men have similar rights and opportunities, according to a new study.

“In more gender-neutral societies, girls are as good as boys in mathematics,” study author Paola Sapienza said in an interview.

The issue of a gender gap in math has been hotly debated, with some suggesting biology may be behind higher scores for boys on some tests and others pointing to environmental and cultural factors.

Sapienza, a professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, examined the results of boys and girls on the Program for International Student Assessment. That test is given to 15-year-olds around the world every three years.

Among 40 countries studied, Iceland was the only one where girls did better than boys on the math test.

In about a dozen countries, both sexes scored about the same. In many of those places, like in Iceland, men and women have similar opportunities and rights, according to the study, which was published in the journal Science.

To assess sexual equality, Sapienza looked at several measures, including the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index, which considers economic, educational and political opportunities for women.

The United States fell in the middle of the pack in terms of both equality for women and the gender gap in math.

In a few countries where girls do not have the same opportunities as boys, girls score about the same as boys on the math test, the report found. These included Indonesia and Thailand.

There also are countries, such as Germany, where there is widespread sexual equality but where a girl-boy math gap exists anyway. The study did not attempt to explain such anomalies.

The study was reviewed by a panel of outside experts.

In reading, girls outperformed boys on the PISA exam in every country studied. That gap does not shrink but widens in places where women are said to have general equality with men.

“The math gap disappears, and the reading gap becomes even bigger,” Sapienza said.

The study did not look at the reasons behind those trends.

Former Harvard University President Lawrence Summers ignited debate over gender gaps a few years ago year when he suggested innate differences between the sexes might help explain why comparatively few women excelled in science and math careers.

The PISA exam is different from other tests in that it assesses how well students can apply mathematical reasoning to real-world situations rather than testing their knowledge of math content.

Source: New Zealand Herald, New Zealand
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/6/story.cfm?c_id=6&objectid=10513442

In other words, less responsible than moms? I hate to stereotype, but, um, turn up the volume, I’m about to start.

I recently did a story on dads and how they are different (duh) than moms, for Canadian Family magazine. (You can find this issue on stands now at Indigo, Chapters, and the usual magazine places.) Besides the anecdotal evidence any parent can provide, studies have also found that dads are more active, rough-and-tumble and boundary-pushing than moms. (Well, maybe not the ones at our old trendy Toronto playground– the dads there seemed to be more working-some-deals, Blackberry-pushing than anything else.)

I think as far as moms go, I fall on the more laissez-faire side of things, active-play wise. If her playroom ends up looking like a hotel room that the Libertines tore through, Doherty blood smear paintings on the wall and all (in her case, paint, y’know, most of the time), I tend not to mind since I know I’ll be tossing some of the toys into the clean-and-donate pile while she’s at school and therefore making some headway through the headwaters of clutter. Also, it’s her playroom, so I figure she can play in it the way she wants as long as she realizes things don’t work that way in most homes (which she does realize.)

Nonetheless, the extent to which my parenting differs from my partner’s often amazes me. (Junk food: “She can eat as much as she wants, she knows when to stop.” Supervision: “Yeah, I was watching her but a lot can happen in a minute. I just turned away and then I heard a scream and that’s why she’s covered in blood. She fell on the stairs. But as you can see, she’s fine!”)

He’s a primary school teacher too, so I find myself often asking aloud, “So, you started the day with how many kids? And at the end of the afternoon, they’re all there? Alive? Accounted for?”

Case in point, yesterday, he decided to let the 8-year-old boys in his class ride an abandoned trike they found in the local park, down a hill, while being pelted by pine cones. “Omigod–it was so funny!” he howled, “It was like an episode of Jackass, only with small kids! They took turns riding down the hill on this toddler trike, and meanwhile all the other boys were throwing handful after handful of pine cones at whoever was on the bike. Then they’d chant, ‘Who wants to go on the Ride of Terror?’ and start all over again!”

So the first things that go through my mind are, litigation issues and also unemployment issues. “Yeah, the principal gave me a hard time about letting the kids go down the hill on magic carpets last winter,” he sighed.

Wondering why any sane teacher would let boys tear down a hill on a trike while being pelted by pine cones, I asked, “Why would any sane teacher let boys tear down the hill on a trike while being pelted by pine cones?”

“Because they were having fun, that’s why. They’d just finished practicing for the standardized testing, and they needed to burn off steam. Also, that little wussy boy whose mom came in to talk with me about how he had no friends and wasn’t adjusting well, was finally fitting in. He was one of the first kids on the trike! He tore down the hill and he loved it!”

What were the girls doing?

“They thought the trike was stupid. They were pretending to make food out of grass and sticks and were playing out some scenarios and stuff.”

Source: AOL Life & Style Canada, Canada
http://blogs.lifestyle.aol.ca/2008/05/28/are-male-teachers-like-dads/

American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson says, “Our best thoughts come from others.”

The problem is, for different reasons many people derail learning by drawing their conclusions too soon, based on incomplete information. They inadvertently close themselves off from an array of enriching resources.

Last year, in the Washington Post’s “How to Keep America Competitive” (Feb. 25), Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft Corporation, wrote, “Innovation is the source of U.S. economic leadership and the foundation for competitiveness in the global economy,” with its workforce as “the most important factor.”

He argued, “if we are to remain competitive, we need a workforce that consists of the world’s brightest minds.” There’s nothing to disagree with here.

Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek affirmed, the U.S. system “is very good at developing the critical faculties of the mind,” and reminds us that foreign governments send observers to U.S. schools “to learn how to create a system that nurtures and rewards ingenuity, quick thinking, and problem-solving.”

Gates has called for “strong schools” for “young Americans (to) enter the workforce with the math, science and problem-solving skills they need to succeed in the knowledge economy.” He laments, out of 29 industrialized nations surveyed, U.S. high school students ranked 24th on an international math test in 2003.

In 2007, he wrote about America’s “crisis point”: computer science employment is “growing by nearly 100,000 jobs annually,” but there’s a “dramatic decline in the number of students graduating with computer science degrees.”

Yet, 25 years ago America’s National Commission on Excellence in Education reported in “A Nation At Risk” that “Our Nation is at risk … the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”

“What was unimaginable a generation ago,” the April 1983 report says, “has begun to occur - others are matching and surpassing our educational attainments.”

The report recommended, among other things, “far more homework”; the teaching of English, mathematics, science, social studies, computer science, each area with specific purposes; as well as the learning of a foreign language in elementary grades.

Falling behind

“Wake up. We are falling behind daily,” the April 30 USA Today’s Greg Toppo quoted Bob Compton of Harvard Business School, an entrepreneur, angel investor, and professional venture capitalist, who has been active in over 30 businesses.

Erik Hromadka’s “2 Million Minutes, How high school students in China, India and Indiana are spending their time,” in the February Indiana Business cover story, “Is Time Running Out?” is a must read.

In 2005, Compton traveled on business across India, to which a growing number of U.S. technology jobs are “being outsourced” — an “economic tectonic shift” taking place in the world. He said he found his “seminal moment” when he asked 5- and 6-year-old first graders in a Bangalore classroom what they want to be when they grow up. “Most of them said engineers or scientists,” compared to American children who “aspired to be rock stars and professional athletes .

The one word that was never mentioned (by American children) was ‘engineer’ and that just shook me to the core.”

Compton sees “strong math and science skills … will allow people in the 21st century to earn high wages,” and that “capital and opportunity are going to flow to where the brains are.”

Compton set out to spend 20 months to make the documentary film “Two Million Minutes” (www.2Mminutes.com) about how high school students in Bangalore, students in Shanghai, and at Indiana’s Carmel High School, among the top five percent of high schools in the U.S., compare and contrast; how they allocate their time in class and at home studying, playing sports, working, sleeping, goofing off, “affecting their economic prospects for the rest of their lives.”

As Toppo reported, the film “finds plenty (for Americans) to be worried about: not enough study or homework time, not enough parental pressure, not enough focus on math or engineering. American teens … are preoccupied with sports, after-school jobs and leisure.”

Americans need to be concerned about their ability to remain globally competitive.

Source: Pacific Daily News, GU
http://tinyurl.com/5rp2ys

Every school has at least one incompetent teacher who should be helped to improve or “moved on”, the schools minister, Jim Knight, has said.

Over the course of a career, one bad teacher can undermine thousands of children’s education, he said, adding that it was a “social justice issue” to ensure every teacher is up to scratch.

The government is developing plans to remove more under-performing teachers but is hoping to enlist the support of the teaching unions in order to avoid a “massive fight” with the 400,000-strong profession, Knight said. The schools secretary, Ed Balls, promised new moves to root out teachers whose “competence falls to unacceptably low levels” in his children’s plan last year.

The General Teaching Council for England (GTCE) has suggested that under-performing teachers should be moved to neighbouring schools to retrain.

In an interview with the Guardian, Knight dismissed estimates over the last year of between 17,000 and 24,000 incompetent teachers in schools, saying there was no firm evidence to put a number on low-performing teachers.

But he said: “If you spoke to anybody about their experience in school and asked them whether there was a teacher who probably should have been doing something else, probably every one of us would say, yeah, we remember that teacher. What we need to do is be able to find a way of helping those people either achieve what they came into teaching for, the moral purpose of helping every child achieve their full potential … or helping them move on to something they will be better at. But we’ve got to do that with the support of the profession, because it’s about raising the esteem of the profession.”

Teachers should receive extensive support to improve, for instance from in-school training with high-performing colleagues, he said. He wanted a discussion with the teacher unions about “what we can do to help those teachers teach better, and if they are not capable of teaching better how to help them move on. That’s a discussion I need to have about whether or not they [the unions] can help us with this.”

He went on: “They were rightly and understandably expressing the concerns … about their members about us signalling in the children’s plan that we want to do something about under-performing teachers, because if that is a code for giving headteachers a licence to be unreasonable about things, then obviously they’ve got a job to do to protect their members. But I want to work with them. What I don’t want to do is end up in a massive fight with 400,000 teachers, given that we’re told by inspectors that the vast majority are doing a really good job.”

Teaching unions have warned that promises in last December’s children’s plan to tackle under-performing teachers would lead to headteachers being given a licence to sack poor-performing staff.

The GTCE has expressed concerns that it has judged only 46 registered teachers “incompetent” since it was established because local authorities have not been referring teachers to it.

It is thought that too many teachers are being “recycled” through the system, moving on to other schools before headteachers can sack them or refer them to the GTCE.

Chris Keates, general secretary of the NASUWT teaching union, said: “There is no evidence of thousands of under-performing teachers in schools. His [Knight’s] comments will only serve to demoralise 400,000 teachers. There is a structured capability procedure which takes 12 weeks and works. Complaints that 12 weeks is too long are unfounded when you consider the fact that you may be changing someone’s whole career. It’s ill-conceived.”

Christine Blower, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said the moves could lead to headteachers “bullying” teachers: “The current capability procedures are good, tough and fair on all sides.”

Source: guardian.co.uk, UK
http://education.guardian.co.uk/schools/story/0,,2282284,00.html

An architect friend and I were recently discussing the various schooling options available to his kid who had completed her eighth grade and was moving to the ninth. Two more years, and she would be finishing secondary school already. How time flies!

Time was, when this friend of mine was considered the most mischievous kid in our class in grade six or thereabouts. Nary would a week pass without his parents being called to school for this or that complaint about him. Finally fed up with his antics, the principal asked that the child be moved elsewhere.

Because our families knew each other, we kept in touch somehow, even when we relocated to another city. He struggled in studies, of course, but managed to trundle through school. Later in college, I learnt that he eloped with some girl and got married, as the parents of the two frowned upon the relationship. Life was one huge rollercoaster for this guy! And after a few years, he finally settled down, set up a good architectural practice, and with time had two kids.

The kids giggle - and the mother joins in the mirth - when I recount to them how their father had once hidden a frog in the chalk-box, and how the teacher had the fright of her life when she opened the lid. All through my narration, the proud father would wear a smug smile and a nice halo around him, soaking in the wholesome praise that the family members would lavish!

Wonder therefore, if the friend had been born to parents who were, uh, from a different stock? What if the parents had not let the child grow naturally on his own accord, but had become concerned at the principal’s words, and sought medical intervention for “treating” him?

(The friend’s father actually roared with laughter when the teacher told him about the frog. Clearly, he approved! I suspect the father’s own antics of childhood must have flashed before his eyes in that moment. Some characteristics get carried forward, you know.)

So, what would have happened if the parents had been more paranoid about the child’s behavior being “different” from the rest of us lambs? What would have happened to his natural effervescence, his zest for enjoying other people’s discomfiture at their expense? What would have happened to his excitement about all things new and novel? We all enjoyed his antics - they were quite harmless; actually we looked forward to it, as they were a nice distraction from the usual drab of rote-learning that school used to be those days.

So, wonder what arc his story would have taken, had his parents been, uh, more concerned? Would he have had it in him to summon the courage to execute the romance-and-elopement-and-marriage project? Would he have settled down in life with a balanced head on the shoulders? Would he have been as successful as he is today?

Going by the recent trends in society, how the story arc would have turned out is the parents taking him to the school’s consulting physician. AND this expert labeling the kid “ADHD case”. AND prescribing him the routine medications that an ADHD patient gets prescribed. The medication becomes the MacGuffin of the plot, whose unfolding would from then on be both unpredictable and thrilling. Thrilling as in a psycho-thriller with a nail-biting climax.

His hyperactivity might have transformed into hallucinations, his cheerfulness would have yielded to nervous ticks and irritability, and his creativity would have been replaced by dizziness and depression. Innocent and defenseless, he wouldn’t have been able to rebel. The romance, elopement, the marriage and the two kids wouldn’t have happened. And I wouldn’t have been able to narrate to the family how the frog frightened the life out of the teacher, whose home was ultimately designed by the very same architect she complained against, almost 34 years ago. (At no cost, too, my friend tells me. His style of atonement, he says.)

Not an expert in this domain, my idle mulling stems from the fierce debate one gets to read in the forums and the news, raging between the two powerful lobbies of the pro- and the anti- psychotic-drug-treatment groups. The NIMH says the drugs are quite okay. This news report from BBC says no.

So as parent, who are we to believe? May be an approach which does not involve medication could be the best way to go for the time being? Let the researchers thrash out amongst themselves and decide finally who is right and who is wrong. May the best side win! But let us not be paranoid and change the child’s story arc from successful architect to one with a psycho-thriller climax.

Source: HULIQ, NC
http://www.huliq.com/60434/your-child-really-adhd

It’s time to abolish the six-week summer holiday. Children’s maths and English skills suffer from it, and boredom leads to petty crime

The Victorians worried that going to school might interfere with a child’s ability to bring in an income for his or her family. So compulsory schooling in its earliest incarnation was very much geared around the needs of children as earners, rather than learners. The starting age was set at five so that children could finish school and start full-time work as soon as possible. A long summer holiday freed up children to work in the fields during the summer picking season.

Fast forward 150 years or so, and many of the features of the original system have stuck - perhaps most notably the long summer holiday. Isn’t it now time to revisit how the school year is structured?

Educational research is unambiguous: a long summer break is an impediment to children’s learning. Studies carried out in the US and the UK show what should be intuitively obvious: with a long break from studying maths and English, children’s abilities take a dive over the summer in both areas. Worryingly, the dip in reading seems to be largest for children from poorer homes, who already start off at a well-documented disadvantage (particularly in England).

This is probably partly down to the quality of children’s educational experiences during the holidays. We know that children from more affluent homes are more likely to have parents who have enjoyed positive experiences of education themselves, and who therefore tend to have more positive attitudes towards their children’s education and more educational resources (like books and games) in the home. Children from better-off families are also more likely to have access to the structured, educational activities in their summer holidays that research has shown are so important for their personal and intellectual development.

Many children say they have little to do over the summer - one survey of 16,000 young people found that eight in 10 said they had little to do outside school. Bored children and young people are a recipe for the higher levels of anti-social behaviour and petty crime we see over the summer - particularly towards the end of the six-week break.

Add to that the fact that the long summer holiday has long been the bane of families with two working parents - many of whom struggle to arrange childcare for their children over the break - and it seems there is a strong case for reconsidering how the school year is arranged.

As part of a broader package of reforms - including giving the curriculum for 5-7 year olds a greater emphasis on school readiness skills and learning through play, providing school counsellors, and broadening curriculum and assessment to focus on a more diverse set of skills - this change would help to address the stalling in standards witnessed in recent years. And it would also make the lives of many working parents a little bit easier.

Source: Guardian Unlimited, UK
http://tinyurl.com/5c2nom

90 per cent of kids fail to meet guidelines

A report card on physical activity levels for Canadian children and youth gives kids a D when it comes to fitness.

The report relies on data from a number of provincial and national surveys and reports.

The grade has been D since 2005, the first year the report was released. However, this year, it finds more and more pre-school aged children are inactive, spending more time in front of TV and reporting higher levels of obesity.

Canada’s Report Card on Physical Activity for Children and Youth for 2008, published by the charitable group Active Healthy Kids Canada, finds that 90 per cent of Canadian children and youth are still failing to meet the guidelines outlined in Canada’s Physical Activity Guides for Children and Youth. The guidelines recommend 60 to 90 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity per day on most days of the week.

The report finds one of the main culprits of inadequate fitness is increased screen time, with kids spending four to six hours daily in front of a TV, either watching shows or playing video games.

High screen times are now being observed in preschool-aged children, with one report indicating close to two hours per day per child.

Pediatric associations have recommended no more than one hour a day for preschoolers and two hours a day for school-aged children and youths.

“While we know that excessive screen time is a problem in school-aged children and youth, new data this year indicates that this is a problem in preschool-aged children as well,” reads the report.

“This finding should be alarming as it shows how early our children are being programmed into a lifestyle of dependence on electronic devices that are often associated with sedentary behaviour,” reads the report.

Children who spend excessive amounts of time in front of a screen are more likely to be obese, have low fitness levels and be less likely to participate in physical activity, the report says.

But the report finds that it is during the teen years where activity levels really drop off. In the New Brunswick Student Wellness Survey, more students in Grades 6 to 8 (58 per cent) said they were active when compared with students in Grades 9 to12 (47 per cent).

There are also activity differences between the sexes. Girls are less active than boys. In the national Tell Them From Me Survey, 50 per cent of boys and only 36 per cent of girls reported meeting a target of 90 minutes of physical activity on most days of the week.

Consequences of inactivity

The report finds that 26 per cent of Canadian children and youth are overweight or obese, and that the prevalence of obesity increases with a child’s age. In children aged two to five, 21.5 per cent are overweight or obese, while 25.8 per cent of kids aged six to 11 years and 29.2 per cent of youth aged 12 to17 are overweight or obese.

The 2006 Canadian Clinical Practice Guidelines on the Management and Prevention of Obesity in Adults and Children stated that “sweeping prevention and intervention strategies are required to slow, and hopefully reverse, the alarming increase in obesity prevalence in Canada and globally.”

Provincially, there are significant differences in obesity levels in children. While Newfoundland, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Manitoba have the highest rates of childhood obesity, Alberta and Quebec have the lowest.

Obesity levels among preschool-aged children are also growing. Young kids between the ages of two and five have obesity rates only slightly below older kids. In a recent Newfoundland study, of 4,161 babies born in 1997 in the province, 15.6 per cent were overweight or obese by ages three to five.

Source: CBC.ca, Canada
http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2008/05/27/fitness-kids.html