| Summary: | INTRODUCTION: Psychiatric disorders are among the most common illnesses in children. Most psychiatric disorders begin in childhood but most children with psychiatric symptoms receive delayed or no treatment. A resilience-based strategy for at-risk children in primary care, such as enhancing childhood sports participation, could be an effective and feasible early intervention. Existing literature demonstrates an association between sports participation and mental health in adolescents and adults, and that exercise can improve depressive symptoms. There are few studies on the link between mental health and sports participation in children under twelve.
OBJECTIVE: Since sports participation could be a simple and potentially available intervention for mental health, we investigated the association between sports participation in children ages 6-11 and measures of psychiatric impairment.
METHODS: We performed linear regression analyses between measures of psychiatric symptoms (total number of CBCL/6-18 syndrome scale elevations and individual syndrome scale elevations) and sports participation as measured by the number of parent-reported sports, with demographic factors as covariates.
RESULTS: The association between sport count and number of CBCL syndrome scale elevations was not significant (p = 0.638). However, we found a significant association between fewer numbers of sports reported and higher T-scores on the Withdrawn/Depressed CBCL syndrome scale (p = 0.019) and was also significant for age (p = 0.003) and ethnicity (p = 0.037).
CONCLUSION: Playing one or fewer sports during childhood is associated with higher withdrawn/depressive symptoms in school-age children. This replicates earlier findings which suggest that sports participation may be protective for child mental health.
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