Keeping Your Children Active During Rainy Spring Weather Can be a Challenge
This has been a spring when commercial indoor playground equipment has really been busy. From fast food restaurants to malls, commercial indoor playground equipment areas are the perfect place to go when the cold temperatures will not leave and the rain and snow will not stop.
Whether the weather is cooperating or not, it is increasingly important to make sure that parents take the time and make the effort to help their children get some exercise. And while warm spring days allow kids to get outside, when the weather does not cooperate parents need to work a little harder to get their children exercise. Although some families have memberships to expensive athletic clubs and have access to gyms every day of the year, other families rely on commercial indoor jungle gyms and other kinds of equipment that are in public spaces across the nation.
Unfortunately, the national childhood obesity rate in America is 18.5%. Too complicate matters, there are as many as 66% of parents worry that their child spends too much time on electronic devices. These devices can not only cause future problems on being able to focus for extended periods of time in a classroom, they also limit the amount of physical activity that a child gets. For these reasons, it is no surprise that the best parents take advantage of indoor playgrounds when necessary.
Consider some of these facts and figures about the importance of exercise in the lives of children and the problems that can occur when children lead lives that are spent with too much screen time:
- Fewer than 33% of children today reach the Sports and Fitness Industry Association’s classification of “active to a healthy level,” which requires them to get a mere 25 minutes of high-calorie-burning physical activity three times a week.
- Researchers found that children would engage in more exercise if their parents did too, after they followed more than 1,000 families with activity trackers.
- Not surprising, children who consistently spend more than four hours a day watching television are more likely to be overweight.
- The American Heart Association recommendations indicate that children over the age of two engage in at least one hour a day of moderate physical activity.
- Studies shown that it is very important for children to have regular opportunities for a variety of gross motor activities. In fact, playing stimulates brain development, and children who so not get this interaction in their first six years will face a lifetime of limited brain power.
- Exercise is important to the financial future of this country. In fact, recent research suggests that if all current eight through 11 year olds in America exercised 25 minutes a day, three times a week, $62.3 billion in medical costs and lost wages over the course of their lifetimes could be avoided. In addition, 1.2 million fewer youths would be obese of overweight.
In many parts of the country, this has been one of the longest winters ever. As a result, a number of parents have had to search out locations that have commercial indoor playground equipment to make sure that their children are getting the daily amounts of exercise that they need.
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