Motor Competence of Children : relationship with health and effects of the COVID-19 lockdown

• Autor(a) principal: Pombo, André Baptista
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.5/31147
• topic: Children; Motor competence; MetS; Health; Physical activity; COVID-19; Crianças; Competência motora; Síndrome metabólico; Saúde; Atividade física; Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Sociais::Outras Ciências Sociais

Childhood and adolescent obesity are widely perceived as one of the most important public health challenges of the 21st century. Obese children, and particularly obese adolescents, are likely to become obese adults and are therefore at increased risk of a range of diseases. Over the last 4 decades, the western societies became significantly less physically active than past generations. Behavioral risk factors such as unhealthy habits, improper diet, and physical inactivity lead to physiological risks, and obesity/overweight is one of the consequences. In early childhood years learning to move is a necessary skill underlying PA. Children begin to learn a group of motor skills, known as fundamental motor skills (FMS), such as running, galloping, skipping, hopping, sliding, leaping, throwing, catching, bouncing, kicking, striking, and rolling. These skills will build a sufficiently diverse motor repertoire that will allow the children to learn adaptive, skilled actions that can be flexibly tailored to different and specific movement contexts. That proficiency in a broad range of locomotor, stability, and manipulative skills, can be defined as Motor Competence (MC) and has a key role in healthy lifestyles. Knowing that the relationship between MC and PA can be bidirectional, depending on the child’s developmental stage, that PA plays an important role in the prevention of becoming overweight and obese in childhood and adolescence, reducing the health risks of the condition, it is expected that MC has a key role in children’s health. This thesis purposes are divided in two parts. First it analyzes the relationship between MC and health markers, investigating specifically the role of MC in Metabolic Syndrome (MetS) risk factors. Results from our first study, a systematic review, confirmed that different studies found associations between MC and isolated MetS markers, namely: a negative association between MC levels and waist circumference (WC), blood pressure, LDL and triglyceride values, and a positive association between MC levels and HDL values. In our second study, the relationship between MC in MetS risk factors (as a cluster of risk factors) was investigated on a sample of primary school children. The results showed that muscular fitness and motor competence were predictors of MetS, whether total MC (first model) or its different components (second model) were entered. The two models presented similar powers to explain the variation of MetS (48% and 47%, respectively). In the second part of this thesis, the effects of COVID-19 lockdown on MC were addressed. The pandemic spread all over the world and brought a new paradigm to children's lives. Children, who used to spend their days at school and playing outside, were suddenly confronted with a home-schooling program, locked in their homes. So, we aimed to understand how Portuguese families with children under 13 years old, faced the lockdown period, mainly concerning their routines of physical activity, sedentary activity, intellectual activity, play, outdoor and screen time. In the third study we confirmed the hypotheses that the COVID-19 lockdown restrictions were adverse to children’s movement behavior. Our results indicated that, according to parental report, during confinement Portuguese children were less active, more sedentary, more engaged in recreational screen-based activities, and spending more time sleeping when compared to the pre-confinement period, with no differences between boys and girls. Aiming to identify which factors influenced the behaviors found in our third study, the purpose of our fourth study was to understand the role of household variables on the percentage of physical activity (%PA) in this confinement situation. The results showed that being younger was the strongest predictor for %PA, followed by having a big outdoor space, having more children in the household, and not having all adults working from home. Lastly, in our fifth study, we hypothesized that the imposed movement restriction situation had a negative effect on the development of children's motor competence. The results confirmed this hypothesis. In fact, a consistent decreasing trend was found in global MC, in its components and individual tests (except jumping sideways), after lockdown when compared to the results before lockdown. Currently, many children have a reduced MC, reduced levels of PA, and high levels of sedentary behaviors. Acknowledging that there is a relationship between MC and health markers, between MC and obesity, and that low levels of MC, PA and increased sedentary lifestyle are strongly associated with childhood obesity, it is necessary to find fast solutions to protect against sedentarism and minimize the impact of such confinement in health.