Study says active children are more resilient to stress

Adults are constantly encouraged to exercise as a way to combat daily stress, but does the same advice apply to children? According to a recent study, the answer is yes. Researchers from the University of Basel in Switzerland have found that active kids are more resilient and better at coping with stressful situations. In other words, if your child is worried about an upcoming math test, consider incorporating active play into their study plan.

Stress in kids

We don’t always consider the stress our kids are under. Perhaps it’s because the worry of fitting in at school, or an upcoming spelling test, which seems trivial compared to the pressures facing an adult. Or perhaps it’s because we’re so wrapped up in our own stress that we don’t always notice when our kids are struggling. Whatever the reason, we know one thing to be true: kids feel stressed out sometimes, too.

If you’re a parent, caregiver or teacher, your gut instinct may be to try and reduce or remove your kid’s stress. This, of course, isn’t always possible (or healthy for the child). This new study, published in the Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport, suggests that encouraging your kids to get up and get moving may be a better way to help them help themselves.

The study

To understand how exercise affects kids’ resilience to stress, the researchers outfitted 110 children between 10 and 13 with a sensor that tracked their daily movement for one week. After that week, they brought the children into the lab twice: once to perform a stressful task, another to perform a non-stressful task (as a control). After each test, the researchers measured the cortisol (a.k.a. the stress hormone) in the kids’ saliva. This indicated the level of physical stress the children were under while completing the task.

The results revealed that the children who got more than one hour of physical activity each day produced less cortisol while doing the stressful task than the kids who got less physical activity. This was true even during the control task, which was in an unfamiliar environment and still produced a small amount of stress for the participants. 

“Regularly active children seem to have a reduced physiological stress reaction in general,” says the study’s lead author, Manuel Hanke.

How does exercise increase resilience?

Just like adults, when children exercise, their cortisol levels naturally rise. The researchers believe that children who regularly raise their cortisol levels when they’re exercising learn how to handle those elevated cortisol levels.

“When children regularly run, swim, climb, etc., the brain learns to associate a rise in cortisol with something positive,” says project director Sebastian Ludyga. This positive association, he says, helps prevent cortisol levels from rising too high in all stress-inducing situations, including writing a test. 

The takeaway

Adults aren’t the only ones who feel stressed. Kids often have a lot on their plates as well, so if you want to help your child deal with daily stressors or handle the pressure of an upcoming exam more effectively, make sure they’re getting lots of physical activity.