Collaborative ECHO research led by Traci Bekelman, PhD, MPH of the University of Colorado, Anschutz Medical Campus investigates how the COVID-19 pandemic affected children’s diet, physical activity, screen time, and sleep. The study found that children’s screen time increased significantly during the pandemic with Hispanic children and non-Hispanic Black children having the most noticeable increase in screen time. The amount of time children spent asleep also increased, but only among children whose sleep time was below the recommended range before the pandemic. The study didn’t find any significant increase in the amounts of sugary drinks and unhealthy snack foods children consumed in the full study sample, but it did find a more noticeable increase among Hispanic children and older children.
This research, titled “Health Behavior Changes during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Longitudinal Analysis among Children,” is published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.
This study included 347 children between the ages of 4 to 12 and their caregivers recruited from ECHO cohorts in California, Colorado, North Dakota, and New Hampshire. Of these participants, 47% percent were female and 62% were non-Hispanic White. ECHO researchers compared children’s diet, physical activity, screen time, and sleep data collected before the pandemic (July 2019 to March 2020) to data collected during the pandemic (December 2020 to April 2021).
For many children, public health measures to mitigate the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted their daily routines, and prevented them from using community resources, such as parks and organized sports. During the first few months of the pandemic, we know that there were changes in children’s health behaviors—such as their diet, screen time, physical activity, and sleep habits. However, there are limited data on what happened to children’s health behaviors after the earliest, most restrictive lockdown period.
“Our study is one of the first to report that increases in screen time persisted into 2021,” said Dr. Bekelman. “Screen time has been linked to physical and mental health outcomes in children, so it will be important to provide families with more support to help them re-establish healthy routines.”
In the future, researchers will continue to investigate children’s health behaviors at other points in the pandemic to reveal whether changes are sustained, and the pathways by which social and economic disruption impacted children’s behaviors. Future studies can also look at changes in more nuanced measures of health behaviors among more diverse groups of children.