Abstract
BackgroundGlobally, millions of children attend Outside School Hours Care. Children’s activity in this setting is critical to meeting daily physical activity recommendations. Guidelines are evidence-based statements intended to optimise practice. This study aimed to identify guidelines used in Outside School Hours Care for physical activity and screen time and summarise their content and methods of development.MethodsOutside School Hours Care guidelines for children aged 5 to 12 years were identified by systematically searching Medline, Emcare, Embase, Scopus, ERIC, Sportsdiscus, TROVE, ProQuest, UpToDate, NICE, SIGN and Google in accordance with PRISMA-ScR guidelines. The search was conducted in March 2019 and results screened independently by two authors. Data were synthesized narratively.ResultsNine guideline documents were identified from grey literature only (n = 8 USA, n = 1 Canada). The included guidelines focused predominantly on the after school care period (n = 9 vs n = 2 for the before school period). All had recommendations for physical activity, whilst 7 included screen time recommendations. There was considerable variability across the physical activity and screen time recommendations, though taken together, they recommended 30–60 min of moderate- to- vigorous physical activity and less than 60 min of recreational screen time per session. All guidelines were developed by expert/stakeholder panels, but none followed rigorous guideline development methods.ConclusionsLimited published guidelines for physical activity and screen time in Outside School Hours Care exist. There is a variation in duration and intensity of physical activity recommended, whilst screen time recommendations are more consistent. Guidelines designed with rigorous tools and for other world regions are warranted.
Highlights
Millions of children attend Outside School Hours Care
Virgara et al BMC Pediatrics (2020) 20:463 within the 24-h day, and that more time on one activity must necessarily mean less time for something else, leading to a “whole-of-day” or integrated approach [5]. In keeping with this paradigm shift, the latest iterations of children’s Physical activity (PA) guidelines published by the World Health Organization, and various countries including Canada [6], Australia [7], New Zealand [8], South Africa [9], Finland [10] and Croatia [11] recommend that each day children aged 5–17 years should get at least 60 min of moderate- to- vigorous physical activity (MVPA), no more than 2 h of recreational screen time and between 9 and 11 h of sleep for children aged 5–13 years, or 8–10 h of sleep for those aged 14–17 years [12]
Given the importance of children’s PA and screen time behaviours in the before and after school periods can have on achieving the 24-h movement guidelines; coupled with the role that guideline documents can play in promoting healthy practice, we set out to review the current state of the international literature regarding guidelines for PA and screen time in the Outside School Hours Care (OSHC) setting. This scoping review aimed to determine the published guidelines that exist for PA and/or screen time for OSHC and the methods used to create the guidelines
Summary
Millions of children attend Outside School Hours Care. Children’s activity in this setting is critical to meeting daily physical activity recommendations. Virgara et al BMC Pediatrics (2020) 20:463 within the 24-h day, and that more time on one activity must necessarily mean less time for something else, leading to a “whole-of-day” or integrated approach [5] In keeping with this paradigm shift, the latest iterations of children’s PA guidelines published by the World Health Organization, and various countries including Canada [6], Australia [7], New Zealand [8], South Africa [9], Finland [10] and Croatia [11] recommend that each day children aged 5–17 years should get at least 60 min of moderate- to- vigorous physical activity (MVPA), no more than 2 h of recreational screen time and between 9 and 11 h of sleep for children aged 5–13 years, or 8–10 h of sleep for those aged 14–17 years [12]. Given this low prevalence of sufficient PA, and high prevalence of excessive recreational screen time, further efforts are required to identify ways to help children achieve healthy daily MVPA and screen time
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