How do home spaces and caregiving shape preschoolers’ everyday movement?

Details

Physical activity in early childhood is known to be important for long-term health, but public health initiatives rarely focus on children below school age, apart from recent WHO guidelines. Little is known about how domestic spaces and everyday caregiving influence preschoolers’ physical activity. The researchers explored caregivers’ perceptions of young children’s activities inside and outside the home and considered whether their lived experiences of caregiving aligned with current physical activity policy.

In Oregon, USA, researchers conducted semi-structured interviews with 49 parents and grandparents from 16 families, each of which had a child aged 3–5 years. Questions addressed caregivers’ perceptions of and involvement with children’s body weights, activities, and food practices. The interviews were analysed using thematic analysis. The analysis drew on a materialities framework, attending to relationships between children, caregivers, spaces in and around the home, and everyday activities.

The researchers developed four themes: the appropriateness of outdoor versus indoor spaces for physical activity; accommodations made for physical activity at home; active spaces of care, meaning relationships among space, type of activity, and caregiver attention; and mundane movement, meaning the low-intensity movement of everyday life. Together, the findings highlighted a spectrum of movement in children’s daily activities, mediated by available spaces and caregiving affordances.

Considering the full spectrum of movement highlighted how children’s activities interlink with family routines, available indoor and outdoor spaces, and the intended uses of those spaces. The authors concluded that these household-level interactions between space, care, and physical activity should inform an integrated, systems-level public health approach to improving preschoolers’ health and well-being. They suggested coordinating policy development across fields such as housing design and urban planning, which structure the activities of children and caregivers across home and outside spaces.