Parental perception and guideline awareness of children's lifestyle behaviours at ages 5 to 14 in Singapore

ABSTRACT

INTRODUCTION@#There are limited data on the descriptive lifestyle behaviour of school-age children in Singapore.@*METHODS@#A total of 100 parents of children ages 5 to 14 participated in a parents' proxy-reported survey. Frequency of moderate physical activity (PA) and vigorous PA was assessed, while t-tests or chi-square test was used to examine differences between weekdays and weekends for sleep, screen viewing time (SVT) and sedentary behaviour (SB).@*RESULTS@#Of the 100 children (68% of Chinese ethnicity, 59% boys, mean age 9.1±2.9 years), 31% were overweight or obese, with body mass index z-score of >1. For moderate and vigorous PA participation in a typical week, 32.0% and 43.0%, respectively, did not participate, while median (interquartile range) days of participation were 3 (2-3) days/week and 2 (1-3) days/week for a duration of 60 (interquartile range 30-120) minutes/session. When comparing weekends with weekdays, the means (standard deviation) of both SVT and sleep duration were higher on weekends (SVT 4.1 [2.9] versus 3.3 [3.1] hours/day, @*CONCLUSION@#Lifestyle behaviours were suboptimal in Singapore children compared with existing overseas guidelines, indicating a need for an integrated guideline with greater dissemination.