Culture Post: Team Sports Score Big Points for Your Child’s Brain

The following is excerpted from an online article posted by HealthDay.

There may be something special about team sports in childhood that helps sharpen a kids’ brain, new research shows.

Children who were on soccer or volleyball teams scored higher on tests of “executive function” — thinking skills needed to organize, remember details, make decisions and stay focused — compared to kids who didn’t play sports or played individual sports only, the new study discovered.

“Scientific data indicate that playing a team sport like soccer improves executive function skills, which are among the most key life skills of all,” Dr. Alison Brooks wrote in a journal commentary accompanying the new study. She’s professor of orthopedics at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

The new study was published Dec. 17 in the journal JAMA Network Open. It was conducted in The Netherlands and led by Lu Yang, a graduate medical student at the University Medical Center Groningen.

Yang’s team looked at data on almost 900 schoolchildren tracked from 2006 through 2017. The kids were assessed at two age periods: Ages 5 to 6 and then again at 10 to 11.

Data was compiled on their daily physical activity (including sports participation), and they were also given cognitive tests measuring executive function at around the age of 11.

The research showed that “moderate” levels of overall physical activity in early life had no significant impact on the kids’ executive function at age 11.

There was one exception, however.

“Children participating in team sports at ages 10 and 11 years consistently exhibited superior executive function compared with participants in individual sports,” Yang and colleagues reported.

Example of team sports the kids routinely engaged in were soccer and volleyball; individual sports included martial arts, swimming or gymnastics.

Source: HealthDay
https://www.healthday.com/health-news/child-health/when-schools-give-kids-time-in-nature-anxiety-and-behavior-issues-ease

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