Little Kids Don’t Sit Still For As Long as Adults Do, Generally

How long do little kids stand sitting still? This study is part of an ongoing effort to explore that question:

“The Influence of Minimum Sitting Period of the ActivPAL™ on the Measurement of Breaks in Sitting in Young Children,” Zubaida Alghaeed, John J. Reilly [pictured here, in adulthood], Sebastien F.M. Chastin, Anne Martin, Gwyneth Davies,  James Y. Paton, PLoS ONE, vol. 8, no. 8, 2013: e71854. The authors report:

“Chastin and Granat [in an earlier study]… found that the mean sitting bout length in free-living adults was 45 minutes. In contrast, and using a 10 s minimum sitting time for purposes of comparison, the majority of sitting bouts for the young children in the present study (study 1) lasted ≤8 minutes suggesting that the children studied predominantly accumulated their sitting time in short bouts.”

(Thanks to investigator Neil Martin for bringing this to our attention.)