The following article comes from the Aspen Institute’s State of Play Kansas City report. The report assesses the opportunities and barriers for more children to access sports and physical activity in the Kansas City region.
At one of our focus groups, we posed a question about what adults should know about children’s experiences with sports and physical activity that might help more kids move their bodies. A teenage boy flipped the question around in his answer.
“I feel like it’s more powerful if other kids tell kids how it helps with your mental health,” the boy said. “That will motivate a kid more than if it’s coming from an adult. How is being on your phone and playing video games going to help you in 20 years compared to going outside, playing more and being more productive? How is it going to help you feel OK now?”
The mental health struggles for children are real. So is the value of physical activity. When sports activities are delivered properly, children in Kansas City told us they receive immense benefits, such as joy, distractions from problems at home and school, and a sense of freedom.
In our youth survey, highly active children were two times less likely to report feeling depressed than inactive youth. Children who received at least 60 minutes of physical activity daily also expressed less anxiety, worry and nervousness and more happiness and motivation nearly every day than their peers who reported no physical activity over the course of a week.
Separate studies show social media has emerged as an important contributor to the mental health crisis among young people. Adolescents (ages 12-15) who spend more than three hours a day on social media face double the risk of anxiety and depression symptoms, and the average daily use in this age group, as of the summer of 2023, was 4.8 hours. Additionally, nearly half of adolescents say social media makes them feel worse about their bodies. U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called for a warning label on social media platforms citing evidence from tobacco studies that warning labels can increase awareness and change behavior.
About 14% of Kansas City-area parents believe that their school-age child’s mental health is “fair” or “poor,” according to a 2022 community health needs assessment of children’s health by Children’s Mercy Kansas City. That rate is well above the national average and marks a statistically significant increase for the region since 2012.
Clay County (17%) had the highest percentage of local parents reporting “fair” or “poor” mental health in their children. About 12% of parents in the region indicated their children show signs of depression — more than double the U.S. average of 5%. Depression rates were unfavorably high in Clay, Jackson and Wyandotte counties. Nearly half of children in the Kansas City region (47%) had at least one adverse childhood experience (ACE), meaning encountering a stressful or traumatic event such as growing up around violence, abuse, neglect, parental abandonment, a parent with a mental health condition, and substance abuse problems in the home.
Given the mental health benefits associated with physical activity, schools are a valuable location for children to be active. More Kansas Cityarea children play sports in P.E. (59%) than any other location except at home (62%), according to our youth survey. Yet the amount of physical activity that children obtain at school can vary drastically depending on the school. In our survey, children from low-income homes were two times more likely to have no P.E. class each week than their peers from middle- and high-income households.
In focus groups with middle school P.E. teachers from Kansas City, Kansas, public schools, teachers stressed that students are increasingly less motivated to be physically active in P.E. class. “You’ll have a percentage of students who don’t even want to walk,” a teacher said. “You tell them they can listen to their own music or read a book while walking, and they still won’t be motivated to do it.
Several teachers said they would love to organize classes differently to motivate individual students, such as offering personal fitness plans, but increasingly larger class sizes combined with small gyms and weight rooms can make such efforts very difficult.
Teachers said that successful P.E. classes involve providing a variety of sports and teaching skills through creative games that students may enjoy. More than half of surveyed Kansas City-area youth (56%) said adults never or rarely ask them what they want to do in P.E. or sports practices.
“Communication is important,” said one P.E. teacher. “Explain to students why things are scheduled the way they are. Teachers need to have energy. You can’t ask students to do things you won’t do. Pump them up a little. Hold their hand sometimes. Give them hugs. It’s us sometimes. When kids are demotivated, sometimes it’s purely my fault.”
Community-Led Solutions
Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City and the Kansas City Royals are partnering on a public campaign called Shut Out the Stigma. As part of the initiative, they produced a documentary called “Not Good Enough” that challenges parents and coaches to think about how their actions can negatively affect the mental health of youth athletes. There’s also a free online course for parents and coaches to learn how to balance constructive feedback with encouragement and support. Additional resources, such as parent checklists, could help. Shut Out the Stigma shared open letters from young athletes written to their parents about the pressures they feel in sports to be perfect. The Royals enlarged the letters and shared them around town.
Children’s Mercy Kansas City announced a comprehensive initiative to illuminate and address the mental health needs of children and teens in the community—four strategies, 14 projects and a new $150 million investment impacting more than 80,000 kids. It's the largest-of-its-kind in the region. Learn more at www.childrensmercy.org/Illuminate.
Jon Solomon is Community Impact Director of the Aspen Institute’s Project Play initiative. Jon can be reached at jon.solomon@aspeninstitute.org.