As a parent, you know that exercise is crucial for your child. Children were designed to move. Movement is how they interact with, interpret, and process their world. This is how they learn and grow!

But in the hustle and bustle of life, it’s easy to disregard or overschedule physical activities. As a pediatric physical therapist, I’ve seen parents struggle to balance their child’s activity levels, often operating at either extreme. 

On one hand, some parents don’t know how much or what kind of exercise their child should participate in, contributing to their kid’s poor health habits. On the other hand, some parents allow their kids to do too much, which leads to burnout. 

Whether you operate at either extreme or you are simply interested in optimizing your child’s health, this blog post will benefit you and your family. Understanding the health benefits of exercise for kids will help guide your decisions to implement healthy exercise habits for your child.

Mental Health Benefits of Exercise:

Your child’s nervous system and mind develop through both novel and consistent physical activity.

New physical experiences challenge your child and wire their brain to their body. From infancy and into childhood, new activities prime this malleable connection. Familiar physical activities prompt your child to fine tune their learned motor patterns. The brain tells the muscles how to move, and through trial and error, the brain learns how to signal the body to move efficiently. 

Through this exposure and reinforcement of movement patterns, your child also learns how to interact with their environment. Motor learning depends on and influences higher levels of mental function.

Think of it this way: Exercise not only improves the brain’s ability to learn physical skills, but it also affects many other mental functions. When your child physically moves through their environment, this stimulates your child’s mind and challenges their:

• Cognition and attention

• Memory and learning

• Social and language skills

• Visual processing and acuity

• Sensory skills

These mental functions improve after a single bout of exercise and grow with consistent exercise. Research shows that kids perform better academically when they have more recess! I could list an endless number of examples, but I won’t waste space here.

Simply, I urge you to acknowledge the essential role that physical activity has on the mind of your child. In our society that is running amuck with pediatric mental health issues, exercise and nutrition must be a top priority, to properly nourish the hungry minds of our youth. 

Physical Health Benefits of Exercise:

Every parent desires for their child to be happy and healthy. This isn’t always easy to achieve. But a first good step is supporting your child and allowing them continued opportunities to grow, even if it’s difficult for you. Sometimes letting your child flail or fail is how they learn and grow. So much mental growth happens in this space, and here is also where they learn physical resilience. 

Let’s look at this growth from birth. As an infant, your child’s muscular tone and postural alignment begin to develop. During your child’s early years, different postural positions and activities challenge their body to develop good muscular control and alignment. 

This establishes a foundation for your child to develop healthy organ functioning and proper movement mechanics. Your child’s body matures to become powerful and efficient through exercise.

Physical activity develops your child’s coordination and balance. When they practice piecing together both novel and successful motor patterns, this is how they obtain their developmental milestones. Milestones develop from ages 0-5 and are classified as gross or fine motor skills. 

Gross motor skills are the large, basic movement patterns, such as rolling, crawling, running, and jumping. Your child learns gross motor skills through constant exposure and practice!

Fine motor skills are the smaller, basic patterns of manipulation with the arms and hands, such as reaching, grasping, and writing. Fine motor skills are cultivated only with dedicated training. Even so, general exercise can improve your child’s brain capacity to process and learn fine motor skills.  

Exercise develops your child’s cardiovascular endurance. This reflects the heart’s ability to maintain sustained activity levels and supply blood flow to their muscles and internal organs.

Of course, you want your child to grow big and strong! It should go without saying, that exercise improves your child’s muscular strength. Strong muscles improve their ability to do the things they love! Stronger kids become healthier and more confident adults. 

Additional physical health benefits include:

• Establishing bone density early in life and protecting bones

• Improving digestive and urinary function

• Boosting immune function 

• Improving sleep quality and maintaining more regulated energy levels

• Weight management and metabolic regulation

As you know, America is facing an obesity epidemic. Lifestyle factors including the lack of nutrition and exercise are foremost contributing to this decline. When children don’t have the natural physical outlets to move, learn, grow, and regulate their stress and emotions, unhealthy fat deposition is inevitable. 

Being overweight or obese as a child is not only physically detrimental, but the impacts on their emotions and psychosocial health are just as damaging. Let’s take a look at the influence of exercise on the emotional health in children.

Emotional Health Benefits of Exercise:

Your child develops emotional regulation through movement and exercise. This topic could have been discussed under mental health benefits, but I truly believe it deserves attention as its own. 

Emotional regulation is how your child processes, experiences, and expresses their emotions. In our current social climate, kids’ brains are constantly overstimulated by technology and micromanaged by school. Kids are now struggling to simply function around others because their minds are completely overwhelmed. Emotional dysregulation is becoming the “new norm”. But this is NOT normal and should not be accepted as such. 

Our duty as adults is to help children learn how to regulate themselves. We can’t do it for them. We can only teach them how and let them thrive in this emotional developmental realm. 

Psychology is not my scope of practice, but the role of a child’s psyche extends far beyond the mind. It begins in their physical body, when they interact and engage with the world. Movement teaches them how to filter input, process sensations and feelings, and then output words and actions. 

Exercise boosts your child’s confidence and improves their self-esteem. When they can successfully learn skills, they become empowered to engage with their peers. Your child needs direct evidence of their strength and talent to shape their confidence, and physical prowess is key to building faith in their abilities as a sovereign individual.  

Exercise helps your child to manage stress and behaviors. Physical activity is the best outlet for your little bundle of energy! Allowing them to run wild, explore, and burn energy will regulate their stress and emotional capacity. This in turn will contribute to fewer behavioral issues and emotional outbursts. 

Lastly, exercise helps your child build healthy relationships. When a child is more effectively able to regulate and communicate their emotions and needs, relationships in all aspects of life improve: relationship with others, with self, and with food and exercise. Building these healthy, sustainable relationships lasts a lifetime.  

Through exercise, you can prevent chronic health issues by establishing:

• Good exercise, recovery, and sleep habits

• Stress management techniques 

• Healthy eating patterns

• Respect for nourishing food, thoughts, and emotions

Children learn first through modeling. So set a good example for your child, and be active yourself! Your family will thank you. And you will thank yourself.

Disclaimer: This blog is intended for informational and educational purposes only and is not considered medical advice.