The way a 10-year-old child spends his or her free time is closely related to how well-adjusted that child is now, and will be in two years, a recent study reveals.
Devoting more of that free time to structured and supervised activities such as hobbies and sports appears to enhance a childs academic, emotional and behavioral development at this age. Spending more time playing outdoors and hanging out, in contrast, appear to detract from development, the article says.
These findings, which appear in the December issue of Child Development, come from research conducted by Susan M. McHale, Ph.D., of Penn State, and her colleagues.
McHale notes that American children enjoy a tremendous amount of free time up to 50 percent of their waking hours, by some estimates. Previous researchers have speculated that the way this time is spent could strongly influence a childs emotional, academic and behavioral development.
McHales research indicates they were right, and suggests why. Her team monitored how 198 white, middle and working class children in the fourth and fifth grades, averaging 10 years of age, spent their free time. The researchers also examined three indicators of development school grades, depression levels and parental reports of bad conduct at the same time as they monitored free-time activities. They looked at the same developmental markers two years later.
On the positive side, the children who spent more time at hobbies were less likely to report symptoms of depression at age 10, while those more engaged in sports tended to report fewer symptoms of depression at age 12. On the negative side, the children who spent more time playing outdoors or hung out a lot were less likely to have good grades and more likely to show bad conduct at both ages.
Reading appears to be a double-edged sword: the 10-year-olds who read more tended to have better grades but also were more likely to report symptoms of depress
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Contact: Susan M. McHale, Ph.D.
x2u@psu.edu
814-865-2663
Center for the Advancement of Health
19-Nov-2001