How Much Playtime Does a Toddler or Child Need

Active play is important for everything from building strength and motor skills to regulating and improving mental health… YES the benefits of exercise are there for BOTH you and your kids! 

So how much active play should babies and toddlers get?

The World Health Organisation has some lovely clear guidelines for all of us! More here but in a nutshell...

Active play for babies

• Floor play is key, several times a day
• Playtime should include 30 mins of tummy time (in small chunks) over the day 

Active Play for Pre school Children

•  3 hours of active physical play a day.
• For over 2 years old this should include an hour of moderate to vigorous activity. 

Active Play for School Age Children

• 1 hour per day of moderate-to-vigorous intensity, mostly aerobic, physical activity.
• Should incorporate vigorous-intensity aerobic activities, as well as those that strengthen muscle and bone, at least 3 days a week.

Active Play for Adults

• It gets more complicated but 2.5-5 hours of moderate intensity aerobic activity over the week is a minimum. 

At all ages variety is important and MORE is better!

What is active play?

We have just created a whole section in our Walky Talky Toddler membership with tons of examples of easy toddler active play, enough for 1 new idea a week for a year! This section is centred around supporting toddlers to find new and enjoyable ways to be active. I'll put some tasters down the bottom for you but first how to fit it in our days!

Whether we are trying to build strength, fitness, co-ordination or skills active play for kids this age must be fun, child-led and flexible. Helping little ones learn to enjoy moving and challenging their bodies is my number 1 goal... because if they love it, they'll do more of it and that's how they get ALL the health benefits from active play over their life times! 

Should you always play with your child?

No! You don't have to be playing with your child in order for them to be playing actively. Often it is just about setting up space for them to play. This may be a physical play space or it could be just creating enough space in their schedules to fit in active play. This incudes limiting sedentary play time for example screen time and times strapped into car seats and prams. The WHO guidelines linked above recommend not restraining babies and toddlers in prams and car seats for more than an hour at a time. 

Is too much screen time bad for toddlers?

We have a whole blog on screen time here. In our blog Paediatric Speech Pathologist Chiara Prigmore;

• Shares with you the guidelines from the World Health Organisation (WHO) on recommended screen time guidelines for young children. 
• Discusses the cognitive affects screen time can have on your child
• Shares how to add interaction and language to screen time, so that it isn’t such a one way conversation
• Talks about alternatives to screen time

In a nutshell the WHO recommendations for screen time for 0-5 year-olds are:

• 0-2 years: screen time is not recommended at all (other than video chatting to family/friends).
• 2-4 years: screen time should be no more than 1 hour; less is better. 

How much sport should a child do a week?

Your school aged child should be engaged in vigorous exercise 3 times a week but they can do this without doing any formal sport at all! Physical activity is a much larger category than sport. Encourage your child to participate in activity that challenges them physically making them huff and puff (building fitness) and makes them use their full strength to build healthy muscles and bones. This could be bike riding, tree climbing, puddle jumping, swimming, bush walking, dancing and SO many more options that fall outside what we traditionally think of as sport. If they love sport then by all means include that too! 

How to structure toddlers day

Are you finding it hard to build active playtime into your routine? Visual timetables provide a simple option for supporting routine and building habits about exercise. We have a FREE course on visual timetables you can join here. Visual timetables are a pictorial representation of the routine in our day. They are EASY TO MAKE and help provide direction and structure. They can be used to represent the routine for an entire day, or just part of a day.

Free printable toddler schedule

Once you have printed your free visual timetable cards you can use them to create a visual schedule for your day and support the inclusion of physical activity for both you and your baby, toddler or child. There are lots more ideas in the free course.

Specifically for including physical activity in your day perhaps at home try: 

• Using VT cards to give choices about type of active play “shall we play with a ball or do some yoga on the mat?”.
• Stick a VT card somewhere  accessible to remind yourself to prioritise exercise and active play.
• Use cards to help support your choices, “this is Mummy’s time to exercise, come join in first and then we can colour in together”, the VT resource shows you how to display the cards to help. 
• Use VT cards to structure movement breaks in between homeschooling activities or your own work time, “now we need to finish this work sheet, next we will go for a scoot on the driveway” . 
• Use VT cards to build fun movement rituals into your day a pre-bath dance party or some animal walks on the way out to the car. The cards will remind you to prioritise movement in your day. 

Active play ideas for toddlers

Here are some of the active play ideas from our Simple Toddler play section. In our membership each has Walky and Talky Tips for embedding strategies to support development within play. We also have lots of photos of different set up ideas. 

• Animal walks- can you jump like a kangaroo, crawl like a bear or creep like a caterpillar? 
• Treasure hunts- inside or outside, make rules around which movements and what to collect, gallop to find a teddy, jump to find a leaf.. the possibilities are endless and an excellent way for including Talky strategies in your Walky play!
• Dig up some equipment from your past- hula hoops, stilts, elastics and skipping ropes we use every day in the clinic and at home for active play.