Impact of the COVID-19 virus outbreak on movement and play behaviours of Canadian children and youtha national survey

Think about a child's day as a single 24-hour canvas. Some of those hours should be sweaty and playful, some quiet and screen-free, and a big block is for sleep. That's the idea behind Canada's 24-hour movement guidelines for kids and teens: integrate physical activity, sedentary time, and sleep, because the mix matters for heart health, bones and muscles, learning, mental health, and even immune function. Here's the rub. Even before the pandemic, most kids weren't hitting the mark. In one national snapshot, only about 12.7 percent met the full set of guidelines. An accelerometer-based study put it around 17 percent, and a 12-country comparison found an average near 7 percent, with Canada around 14. Outdoor play helps—more minutes outside tend to mean more movement, less sitting, and better sleep—but going outside suddenly got complicated. On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. Schools shut. Sports leagues paused. Playgrounds were taped off. Families were told, quite sensibly, to stay home and keep their distance. Kids were less likely to get seriously ill, but they could carry the virus to grandparents or vulnerable adults. In a matter of days, the physical and social scaffolding that supports kids' movement fell away. If you're a parent, you remember the scramble: remote classes, restless kids, cabin fever. The question became urgent and very practical: how did this new reality reshape children's activity, screens, and sleep—and what were families doing that helped? Moore and colleagues moved fast to answer that. About a month into the first wave, they ran a national, cross-sectional survey of parents of children aged 5 to 17. They used Maru/Matchbox, a large Canadian online panel with more than one hundred thousand members, to recruit a sample quickly and keep it broadly representative. Fifteen minutes, in English or French, and one child per household—the one whose first name came earliest in the alphabet, to avoid picking the star athlete or the most worried teen by accident. Ethics approval was in place. And to check that their questions were stable, they ran test–retest reliability: across most movement items, the week-to-week correlations were very high, in the range of 0.79 to 0.99. Parents reported what their child had done in the past week and, crucially, how that compared to the weeks before COVID-19. The survey was built around the 24-hour guidelines. It asked about moderate-to-vigorous physical activity—those huff-and-puff minutes—sleep over a full day, and leisure screen time. It also probed where that movement happened: inside or outside, walking or biking around the neighborhood, helping with chores, or playing with family. For each, parents rated change on a five-point scale from "a lot less" to "a lot more," with the middle meaning "no change." There was room to tell stories, too. Short open-ended prompts invited what families were trying, what was working, and what wasn't. Two independent analysts coded those text responses with nearly perfect agreement—about 98 percent—after ironing out labels. Now, the picture that emerged? Stark but not surprising. Kids moved less, went outside less, sat more, used more recreational screens, and slept a touch more. In the analyzed sample of roughly 1,472 parent-child pairs drawn from the 1,503 who started, only a sliver met the full movement recipe during the outbreak. Overall, about 2.6 percent hit all three: enough activity, limited screen time, and age-appropriate sleep. When you split by age, it looks even more lopsided: 4.8 percent of children aged 5 to 11 cleared the bar; among those aged 12 to 17, just 0.6 percent did. That's a long way down from the pre-pandemic figures from Rhodes and Carson and the international comparison mentioned earlier. Let's put some concrete numbers to the days themselves. For elementary-age children, parents reported moderate-to-vigorous activity on about 3.6 days a week, nine and a bit hours of sleep a night, and roughly five hours of leisure screen time a day. For teens, it was closer to 2.6 active days, nine hours of sleep, and about six and a half hours on screens. That last number jumps out. If you're picturing homework and Zoom school, remember: these were leisure screens—TV, gaming, social media. And for adherence to single guidelines, the pattern was uneven. Roughly 24 percent of children met the activity target, compared with 13 percent of teens. Sleep was, oddly, the bright spot: around seven in ten in both age groups were in the recommended range. Screen time was where the wheels came off: about 17 percent of children and just 8 percent of teens stayed under the two-hour limit. Girls were less active than boys in both age groups, a familiar and frustrating pattern that didn't disappear in a crisis. Among children aged 5 to 11, about 19 percent of girls versus 28 percent of boys met the activity guideline; among those aged 12 to 17, it was 11 percent versus 15 percent. Girls also gravitated more to social media and, in some comparisons, slept a bit more than boys. Age mattered too. As you moved from childhood to adolescence, declines in movement and increases in screen time were steeper. What changed most compared to life before COVID? Outdoor physical activity and sport took the biggest hit. On that five-point change scale, outdoor activity and sport averaged around 2.3 for children and just under 2.0 for youth, where a score of 3 would mean no change—so clearly less. Walking or biking around the neighborhood slumped as well, especially for teens. Indoor physical activity slipped, though not as sharply. Inside play held up better—parents of younger kids still reported lots of Lego, forts, and chase around the living room—but outdoor play dropped. On the flip side, watching TV and other screens rose to about a four out of five—"more," bordering on "a lot more"—and social media ticked up, particularly for teens. Family time sitting together was high. Family physical activity nudged up in some homes, but on average, stayed modest. Take a breath with that. When the natural outlets for movement—recess, sports practices, riding bikes with friends—were suddenly removed, many families did what was easiest and what was placed right in front of them: they leaned on screens. That's understandable. But it strengthens a simple insight: when the environment makes the active choice the hard choice, fewer people make it. For kids, the gap can grow fast. The open-ended answers added texture to the numbers. About half of parents said their child had taken up a lot more indoor hobbies. One in five reported more outdoor hobbies too, even with the constraints. Inside, the hits were classic: arts and crafts, puzzles and board games, and—yes—video games. About 17 percent of those new indoor activities were screen-based. Outside, the go-tos were biking and walking or hiking, with a smaller bump in backyard sport. New family pastimes cropped up as parents tried to keep spirits up—puzzles, games, craft projects—and about 16 percent mentioned using online resources or apps to get kids moving. That last detail matters. Digital supports weren't a cure-all, but they were a lifeline for some households. Here's where the story turns from averages to differences between families. Moore and colleagues dug into the correlates—what lined up with healthier patterns despite the shutdowns. Some of the associations were about the home itself. Living in a detached house, which often means a yard or easier access to streets and sidewalks, was linked to more outdoor activity and more walking or biking in the neighborhood. Owning a dog nudged kids outside—more outdoor play and a little less indoor play. These are small correlations, around a tenth, but they point to the role of space and routine. The larger signals were social. Younger parents reported smaller declines in their child's physical activity and outdoor play and a slight uptick in sleep. Two-parent households showed modest links with more outdoor play and more helping with chores. But the strongest pattern—by far—was parental engagement. When parents encouraged activity, their kids logged more outdoor movement, more walking and biking, more indoor exercise, and more time being active together as a family. And when parents didn't just cheer from the couch but joined in, the associations jumped. Co-participation—going out for the walk, hopping on the bike, throwing the ball in the yard—tracked with more child outdoor physical activity and walking or biking in the neighborhood, with correlations around 0.32. Outdoor play moved even more, near 0.39. Family physical activity as a whole climbed alongside, around 0.44. For statistics listeners: these are moderate, consistent effects, all significant with a p-value below 0.01. In plain language, when parents got moving with their kids, the day looked healthier. Another thread tied the day together. Changes in outdoor time were meaningfully linked to overall movement. Families who managed to keep getting outside saw larger gains or smaller losses across the movement spectrum. Quantitatively, shifts in outdoor time correlated about 0.34 with changes in overall movement and roughly 0.28 with light physical activity. It's a simple lever with a big reach: open the door, literally, and more good things follow. If you're wondering about methods—were these just vibes?—the team used standard tools. They stratified the sample by age group, from 5 to 11 and 12 to 17, to make fair comparisons. They analyzed group differences with the usual suspects—chi-square for categorical outcomes, analysis of variance for continuous ones—and treated a p-value below 0.01 as their threshold to avoid chasing noise. And they were transparent about limits. This was cross-sectional and parent-reported. That means recall bias and social desirability are in play, and we can't say what caused what. Participants received small incentives, and while the panel is designed to be representative, the findings are anchored in the Canadian context and in that first pandemic spring. We also don't know, for every household, who was working from home or navigating job loss, both of which can reshape a day. So, what do we take from all this, beyond a historical snapshot? First, the decline in movement during COVID-19 wasn't a subtle shift you'd need a statistician to detect. It was a collapse in the balance of the day, especially for teens and especially for discretionary screen time. Second, the soft spots and the strengths were familiar. Girls were less active than boys. Teens were less active than younger kids. And outdoor time was a linchpin—protect it, and more of the day falls into place. Third, and most hopeful, families had agency. Moore's team didn't just find problems; they found patterns of resilience. Detached homes and dogs helped, but the headline was parental behavior. Encouragement mattered. Modeling mattered. Co-participation mattered most. If you wanted one takeaway to put on the fridge, it might be this: if you can, be active with your child, outside, most days. Aim for about an hour of moderate-to-vigorous movement, keep leisure screens to roughly two hours, and anchor the day with consistent sleep. None of that requires a gym. It does require attention. Public health has a role too. The authors argued for a balance between infection control and everyday health. Keep green spaces open with distancing rules. Make it easy to walk and bike—widen sidewalks, slow traffic, create temporary lanes. Share simple, accessible ideas for active play at home, and help families find credible online resources. All of those moves respect the disease while protecting the day. As the world moves on from those early months, the long view matters. We need to know whether kids' movement patterns bounced back as schools and sports reopened, and where gaps lingered. But the core lessons travel beyond the pandemic. The 24-hour canvas is always there. Environments invite or impede movement. And the people closest to kids—parents and caregivers—can tilt the balance, decisively, toward health. One last thought, because it turns out to be the oldest one. Children learn how to be in their bodies with other bodies. When the world squeezed those opportunities, some families rebuilt them at kitchen-table scale, on driveways and sidewalks. As Moore and colleagues showed, that choice—humble, repeatable, often messy—was the difference between a day that drifted and a day that worked.