Canadian Child Care Laws Still Overlook 24-Hour Movement Guidelines for Disabled Children

Canada’s licensed child care centres are, by almost every measure, an enormous influence on the health of the country’s youngest citizens. In 2023, just over half of Canadian children aged 0 to 5 years were enrolled in some form of child care, and the environment in which those children spend their days has been shown to account for nearly 50 percent of the variation in their physical activity levels—more influential than age, sex, or ethnicity. Yet a new systematic review of the country’s provincial and territorial child care legislation, published in the International Journal of Child Care and Education Policy, reveals a patchwork of vague, inconsistent, and in some cases entirely absent requirements for the very behaviours that shape early health trajectories: physical activity, sedentary behaviour and screen time, and sleep. More striking still, most jurisdictions say almost nothing about how children with disabilities should be included in movement opportunities at all.

The review, led by Leigh M. Vanderloo of the University of Western Ontario and ParticipACTION, together with Alexandra A. Puchiele, Brianne A. Bruijns, Sarah Carsley, and Patricia Tucker, updates an earlier legislative scan conducted in 2018, before Canada released its first integrated 24-Hour Movement Guidelines for the Early Years. Those guidelines, introduced in 2017 and implemented from 2018 onward, recommend that children aged 0 to 4 accumulate at least 180 minutes of physical activity per day, including energetic play; limit recreational screen time to no more than one hour per day for children aged 2 to 4, and none at all for children under 2; and obtain sufficient nightly sleep ranging from 14 to 17 hours for newborns down to 10 to 13 hours for 3- and 4-year-olds. The World Health Organization followed with its own early years guidelines in 2019 and, in 2021, published global standards for healthy eating, physical activity, sedentary behaviour, and sleep specifically for early childhood education and care settings. The question the research team posed was simple: had Canadian child care legislation caught up?

The methodological approach was straightforward but laborious. In June 2023, the researchers collected the child care acts and regulations for all 13 provinces and territories—Nunavut adheres to the Northwest Territories’ legislature—directly from government websites, cross-checking their selections against the Childcare Resource and Research Unit’s online repository. They then screened every document for keywords covering physical activity and its proxies (gross motor play, energetic play, active play), sedentary behaviour and screen time, sleep and rest, outdoor time, indoor and outdoor space requirements, the 24-Hour Movement Guidelines, and disability or inclusion. Because outdoor play and active play are frequently used in the literature as proxies for physical activity—and because studies show preschoolers accumulate substantially more moderate-to-vigorous activity outdoors than indoors—the team treated these domains as critical indicators of legislative support for movement. Data were extracted into a structured table, verified by a second researcher, and compared across jurisdictions for frequencies, commonalities, and gaps.

The results paint a picture of legislative inconsistency. On the positive side, every province and territory requires daily outdoor play during favourable weather, and all but Saskatchewan embed some form of physical activity requirement tied to developmental milestones. But the specificity ends there. Of the 92 percent of jurisdictions that reference movement-promoting activities, 83 percent provide no requirement for duration, intensity, or method. Only four provinces explicitly use the term physical activity—British Columbia, the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, and Nova Scotia—and only two jurisdictions specify a daily dose: the Northwest Territories requires 30 minutes of physical activity per day, while British Columbia’s Director of Licensing Standard of Practice mandates 120 minutes daily, a target that, if met, would help children achieve two-thirds of the national guideline requirement during child care hours alone.

Screen time fares worse. Only three jurisdictions—British Columbia, New Brunswick, and Quebec—address sedentary behaviour or screen use in their regulations, and only British Columbia and New Brunswick explicitly prohibit screen time in defined circumstances. British Columbia’s rules are the most granular: a maximum of 30 minutes of screen time per day, restrictions on prolonged sedentary behaviour, a prohibition on screen activities in daily programs shorter than three hours or for children younger than two, a requirement that educators model healthy screen behaviour, and a mandate that each centre develop a formal Screen Use Policy. Sleep, by contrast, appears in the legislation of 62 percent of jurisdictions, with New Brunswick and Ontario specifying a maximum of two hours of rest for children and infants, several jurisdictions requiring uninterrupted rest periods, and most requiring consultation with parents about individual sleep patterns.

Perhaps the most consequential finding concerns the integration of the national guidelines themselves. Only one jurisdiction—British Columbia, through its supplementary Active Play Standard—explicitly references the 24-Hour Movement Guidelines in its child care framework, amounting to just 8 percent of provinces and territories. New Brunswick and Quebec independently mention physical activity, sedentary behaviour, and sleep without invoking the integrated framework. This matters because a recent survey found that only 44 percent of Canadian child care centres have a physical activity policy at the centre level, and just 29 percent address screen viewing—and most of those centres cited provincial regulations as the source of their policy. In the absence of clear provincial direction, individual centres are left to invent their own daily metrics, producing wide variability in the movement opportunities afforded to children depending simply on where they live.

The disability analysis is arguably the review’s most sobering contribution. Approximately 13.5 percent of Canadian children under 14 experience difficulty with activities of daily living, and about 62 percent of children aged 0 to 5 with disabilities—roughly 176,000 children—attend child care. Yet only six jurisdictions (Alberta, British Columbia, Newfoundland and Labrador, the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, and Ontario) mention children with disabilities in their regulations at all, and just three—the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, and Ontario—specifically require that activities and play spaces be adapted to support the movement behaviours of children with disabilities. No jurisdiction provided guidance on the meaningful inclusion of children with disabilities in physical activity. The gap is compounded by the fact that the national 24-Hour Movement Guidelines were themselves developed using evidence from children without disabilities, leaving educators without an evidence base tailored to this population. Research cited in the review indicates that children with disabilities are consistently less active than their peers, that achieving adequate movement behaviours is associated with higher school achievement and better self-regulation and emotional health, and that only one in five Canadian child care centres offers high-quality care for children with disabilities. Nearly 10 percent of families report their child was denied a child care space because of a condition.

Why has legislation lagged? The authors point to a persistent misconception that young children are naturally active and therefore need no policy attention—despite mounting evidence that children in child care are highly sedentary. They also note a genuine evidence gap: the Canadian guidelines were built on data from children without disabilities, and the effects of physical activity vary across disability types, meaning some children face barriers to certain activities while others thrive with adapted sports and play. Policymakers, the authors argue, must weigh both outcomes when drafting legislation. The economic stakes are considerable; the federal government has committed $30 billion to a Canada-wide early learning and child care system whose framework explicitly prioritizes the participation of children with disabilities.

The evidence that policy works is compelling. A meta-analysis by Saravanamuttoo and colleagues found that children attending centres with formalized physical activity policies engaged in significantly more activity than children in centres without them. In Australia, a pragmatic cluster randomized trial across 81 centres found that requiring policy implementation over three months significantly increased director-reported policy practices. Studies in New Zealand and the United States report similar patterns, while Australia’s state-based National Quality Framework demonstrates that federated systems can still standardize care—a relevant comparison for Canada’s 13 distinct legislative regimes. Experimental work also underscores the value of outdoor time: one study calculated that a preschooler needs only 3.8 minutes outdoors to accumulate one minute of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity, compared with 9.1 minutes indoors.

The authors acknowledge limitations. The existence of legislation does not guarantee implementation, enforcement, or quality, and educator training remains essential; Alberta’s 2017 accreditation standard, which lacks specific time requirements, produced no measurable change in children’s in-care activity in a subsequent evaluation. Generalizability beyond Canada is also limited. But the core message is unambiguous: at a moment of unprecedented federal investment and public attention, provinces and territories have a rare opportunity to legislate clear, evidence-based movement behaviour targets—and to pair them with training, resources, and inclusive programming—so that every child in care, with or without a disability, gets an equal start on a healthy trajectory.