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Our Child Physical Activity, Health and Development team focuses on improving children’s physical activity levels, health and development. We work to uncover the best environments, policies and programs to facilitate physically active lifestyles for lifelong health and wellbeing.
The PLAYCE Cohort was established to investigate how movement behaviours change over early to late childhood, across key behaviour settings and relationships with health and development
With rising levels of physical and mental health issues, ensuring children establish good physical activity behaviours early in life is more important than ever.
Researchers exploring the potential health benefits of pets have found children who regularly walk and play with a family dog are more active, have less screen time, and sleep more.
Energy drinks (EDs) are not recommended for minors' consumption due to a myriad of health risks, but marketing initiatives persist. This study explored the promotion of EDs on TikTok, a platform frequented by children and adolescents.
24-hour Movement Guidelines for the Early Years promote that achieving all three-movement behaviour (sleep, sedentary behaviour and physical activity) recommendations is important for child health and development. We examined the association between meeting all, none and combinations of the Australian 24-Hour Movement Guidelines for the Early Years and social-emotional development in 1363 preschool (2-5 years) boys (52%) and girls.
We explored childcare educators’ perceived barriers and facilitators to policy implementation in order to inform the development and implementation of an early childhood education and care (ECEC) specific physical activity policy. This study was part of the Play Active (2019-2023) project which aimed to develop, implement and evaluate evidence-based physical activity policy to improve physical activity levels in children attending ECEC.
This study investigated whether the timing of birth of the younger siblings was associated with the risk of the older siblings’ developmental vulnerability in early childhood.
To investigate the correlates of adolescent energy drink use using a socioecological approach to inform future interventions.
To test the internal validity of the test-negative design (TND) by investigating associations between maternal influenza vaccination, and new virus detection episodes (VDEs), acute respiratory illness, and healthcare visits in their children.