Jim Liebelt's Youth Culture Watch

Pandemic Curbed Kids' Efforts to Lose Excess Weight

*The following is excerpted from an online article posted by HealthDay.

A new study is highlighting yet another consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic: It has likely made it even harder for kids with obesity to manage their weight.

The findings, researchers said, are no surprise. Many adults, faced with normal life being upended during the pandemic, have seen changes on the bathroom scale.

It's also clear kids have not been spared, either. A recent government study found that during the first nine months of the pandemic, U.S. children and teenagers gained weight at twice the rate they had in the two years prior.

And while COVID restrictions have eased, life is not back to "normal," said Bradley Appelhans, the lead researcher on the new study.

"Kids are back in school now, but some activities are still curtailed," said Appelhans, an associate professor at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago.

For the study, Appelhans and his team tracked 230 children from urban, low-income families who were enrolled in a clinical trial testing an obesity treatment program — either before or during the pandemic.

Over one year, these kids typically saw an increase in their body mass index (BMI) — a measure of weight in relation to height. That stood in contrast to children in the program pre-pandemic: They typically showed a decrease in BMI that was sustained over one year.

The researchers suspect the findings reflect the conditions of the pandemic, rather than an ineffectiveness of tele-sessions.

"Even though families were getting support, kids were still stuck at home, with nothing but the refrigerator and video games for distractions," Appelhans said.

School, he noted, gives kids outlets for exercise and free or reduced-cost meals, as well as a general structure for the day.

That lack of daily structure could be one of the major reasons for kids' weight gain during the pandemic, said Amanda Staiano, a researcher who was not involved in the study.

The findings were recently published online in the journal Obesity.

Source: HealthDay
https://consumer.healthday.com/11-18-pandemic-curbed-kids-efforts-to-lose-excess-weight-2655746224.html

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In-school Study Suggests Children Multitasking on Different Media Harmful to Mental Health

*The following is excerpted from an online article posted by MedicalXpress.

A team of researchers from the University of Luxembourg and Universite´ de Genève has found evidence that suggests it is not how much time children spend on electronic media but how they do it that can lead to problems. The team has written a paper describing a study they conducted at a public primary school in a Geneva, Switzerland suburb and what they learned from it and have posted it on the open-access site PLOS ONE.

The study focused mainly on the children, aged 8 to 12—118 of them, both boys and girls filled out questionnaires given to them by the researchers. The questions were designed to learn more about media use and also things like attention issues, sleep quality and amount, grades, motivation levels, beliefs, and mental health in general. The questionaries given to the teachers and parents were focused on learning about their perceived notions of media use by the children.

After analyzing their data, the researchers found little evidence of media use contributing to mental health problems in the children in general—it was only when they tried to mix them that problems cropped up. Watching TV, for example, while texting with friends on their phone, they found, could lead to more stress and sometimes behavioral or emotional problems. They also found that the amount of time the children spent using media grew as they aged—at age 8, such use came to approximately four and a half hours a day. By age 12, that number grew to over eight. The researchers also found, as expected, that boys spent more time playing video games than girls.

Source: MedicalXpress
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-11-in-school-children-multitasking-media-mental.html