Australian children missing sports basics

Modern lifestyles are causing Australian children to miss out on basic movement skills that could affect their lifetime health, claims Deakin researcher Dr Lisa Barnett.

“Half of Australian children haven’t mastered basic movement skills like throwing, kicking and jumping by the time they leave primary school,” Dr Barnett said.

“In Australia we don’t have normed data on these skills but when we compare kids of today to normed data from America 15 years ago we have many more children than we would expect falling into the poorer range.”

“Without these basic movement skills, children may not have the skills needed to join in a game in the primary school playground or play team sports once they get to high school, and indeed they may never acquire them. High school physical education is sport-focussed and has expectations that children will already have these skills.”

“Most importantly, these skills are linked with lifetime behaviour patterns that affect risk of obesity and other health problems. People need a range of skills and a ‘can do’ attitude if they are to remain active throughout their lives, whether this be taking up hiking, cycling, a vigorous sport, Tai Chi or yoga,” she said.

Dr Barnett also researches children’s perceptions of how good they think they are at these movement skills, as self-perception is an important motivator of physical activity participation.

She has developed an App to be used on Android devices for children to rate their own movement skills and researchers in 13 different countries are now using this tool to assess children’s self-perceptions of their movement competence.

Dr Barnett has recently received the 2015 Early Career Distinguished Scholar Award from the North American Society for the Psychology of Sport and Physical Activity (NASPSPA), of which she has been an active member for the past five years.

An Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Deakin’s School of Health and Social Development, she has achieved a string of awards throughout her career, including a Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Outstanding Contribution to Research (Early Career Researcher) in 2012, and an NHMRC post-doctoral research fellowship in 2011, amongst many others.

As part of her NASPSPA award, Dr Barnett will give a presentation summarising her research at the 2016 annual meeting of NASPSPA in Montreal.

She has also recently become the Assistant Editor of the “Health Promotion Journal of Australia,” and is about to commence a two-year term as the first international member on the Editorial Board for the “Research Quarterly for Exercise Science and Sport” (an American-based journal that has published continually for 86 years).

Dr Barnett is a passionate advocate for enhancing physical activity opportunities for children and has over 10 years’ experience working as a public health practitioner, in addition to her academic career.

She explained that there is strong evidence that primary school interventions can make a real difference to children’s activity levels.

“People are not born with good basic movement skills - they need the opportunity to practice,” she said.

“Today, many children are not playing outside the way they used to. Another concern is that many primary schools don’t have access to specialist PE teachers, who understand the importance of skill development and quality physical education.

"For our future health as a population, we need to target physical literacy, just like we do English or Maths, so that children are supported to develop these skills and the attitudes and behaviours they need to engage in lifelong physical activity.”

Dr Barnett and her team are working on a number of projects, including developing a physical education assessment for teachers to identify skill deficits, and exploring the value of active video games, such as those offered through Wii and X-Box Kinect, in increasing self-perceptions of skill ability, particularly for children with autism.