Physical activity and sedentary behaviour among children and adolescents with intellectual disabilities during the COVID-19 lockdown in China.
Lockdown cut physical activity to just 10 min a day and pushed sitting to almost 9 hours for kids with ID—embed brief, intense movement bursts in every future program.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Yuan et al. (2022) asked parents of 230 Chinese kids with intellectual disability to recall their child's day during the strict COVID-19 lockdown. Parents logged how many minutes the child sat, played on screens, or moved hard enough to breathe fast.
Kids were 6-17 years old. Half lived in cities, half in rural towns. No one left home for school or parks for weeks.
What they found
The average child did only 10 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity each day. That is less than one short cartoon episode.
At the same time they sat about 530 minutes—nearly nine hours. Older teens were the worst off; they moved even less and sat more than the younger kids.
How this fits with other research
Hinckson et al. (2013) warned us we have no perfect tool to measure activity in kids with ID. Q et al. used parent recall, the same shaky method Aneke flagged, so the scary 10-minute number could be even lower in reality.
Van der Molen et al. (2010) showed kids with mild ID already score in the motor-impaired range before any crisis. The lockdown simply poured extra salt on a long-standing wound.
Petrovic et al. (2016) found that almost half of adults with ID in hospitals have metabolic syndrome. The new data say children are now walking the same path—tiny movement plus long sitting is the first step toward that diagnosis.
Why it matters
Ten minutes of movement is a red-alert for BCBAs. Build short, fun movement breaks into every home or school session: dance, balloon volleyball, hallway walks. Track totals with a simple clicker and aim to add two extra minutes each week so the next crisis does not erase their health.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Open each session with a 3-minute follow-the-leader jog or dance and tally the minutes on a whiteboard.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, preliminary research has reported a significant decline in physical activity (PA) and an increase in sedentary behaviour (SB) among typically developed children and adolescents. Limited research has looked at the current situation of PA and SB during this pandemic among children and adolescents with intellectual disabilities (ID). This study investigated the situations about PA and SB among school-aged children and adolescents with ID on China's mainland during the COVID-19 outbreak. METHODS: In total, 837 parents of children and adolescents (ages 6-18 years) with ID from 15 special education schools of Shandong Province in China were recruited through convenience sampling in the study. Parents reported PA and SB among children and adolescents with ID through the Children's Leisure Activities Study Survey-Chinese version (CLASS-C) online questionnaires. RESULTS: From parents' reports, Chinese children and adolescents with ID during the COVID-19 pandemic participated in approximately 10 min of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity, and engaged in approximately 530 min of SB every day. Meanwhile, only 17.4% of children and adolescents with ID were able to achieve the recommendation of 60 min of daily moderate-to-vigorous physical activity and 76.1% of children and adolescents with ID spent more than 2 h on SB per day. Additionally, the problems of decrease PA and excessive SB were more prominent in older adolescents with ID compared with younger children with ID. CONCLUSION: In China, the low level of PA and high level of SB is particularly evident in children and adolescents with ID during the outbreak of COVID-19. The great majority of children and adolescents with ID did not meet the recommended amount of PA while undergoing excessive SB under the long-term home quarantine environment. Therefore, immediate attention and great effort should be made to deal with this severe situation among this vulnerable population in the mainland of China.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 2022 · doi:10.1111/jir.12898