Active Commuting to School, Physical Activity, and Behavior Problems Among Third-Grade Children

Path of Physical Exercise's Impact on Deviant Behavior Among Chinese Adolescents

Purpose

Physical exercise is an important predictor of deviant behavior in adolescents; however, the paths and mechanisms underlying this relationship remain understudied.

Patients and Methods

This cross-sectional study used education tracking data of 8725 Chinese adolescents (4453 males, 4240 females, average age 14 ± 0.73) to construct a chain mediation model to explore whether sleep quality and mental health mediated the relationship between physical exercise and adolescent deviant behavior.

Results

The results show that physical exercise cannot directly predict adolescent deviant behavior; however, it can indirectly affect deviant behavior through the mediating effect of sleep quality and mental health as well as the chain mediating benefit of "sleep quality-mental health".

Conclusion

Sleep quality and mental health are important internal factors of physical exercise that inhibit deviant adolescent behavior. The lack of physical activity and poor sleep quality should be prioritized in interventions regarding deviant behavior among Chinese adolescents.

The physical activity of children and adolescents in Germany 2003-2017: The MoMo-study

With digitalization and virtual entertainment being the megatrends of the 21st century, there is reasonable concern about the role of physical activity (PA) in the daily life of children and adolescents. To identify risk-groups with insufficient PA and to guide interventions, continuous and representative tracking of PA is crucial. In this paper, representative PA data of children and adolescents from the Motorik-Modul (MoMo) baseline study (2003-2006, N = 4,528) is compared to those of Wave 2 (2014-2017, N = 3,708). Participants aged 4-17 were drawn out of 167 sample points in Germany and the data was weighted to ensure representativeness for Germany. Organized (sports clubs and schools) and unorganized (unorganized sports and playing outside) PA was measured by questionnaire and stratified by sex, age, and socioeconomic status. Contrary to common expectation, overall PA remained stable among youths in the past ten years, however, there is an ongoing trend towards organized forms of PA at the expense of unorganized sports and playing outside. Besides different trends in settings, there is inequality in PA distribution among socioeconomic status and gender, unequally pronounced in different settings.