Parks Cut Kids’ Screen Time, but Sidewalks Tell a Different Story for Boys and Girls

When city planners add a park, a sidewalk, or a playground to a neighbourhood, they usually assume the whole family of unhealthy movement behaviours will improve together: less sitting, less screen time, more running around. A new study from Quebec suggests that assumption is wrong in a strikingly specific way. Researchers following hundreds of children at risk of obesity found that the built environment shapes physical inactivity, sedentary behaviour time, and screen time as three separate phenomena, each with its own set of neighbourhood triggers, and each responding differently in boys than in girls. The findings, published in the Journal of Activity, Sedentary and Sleep Behaviors, come from one of the first studies to compare all three outcomes side by side in the same children at two developmental stages.

The research team drew on the QUALITY cohort, an ongoing investigation into the natural history of childhood obesity that recruited 630 Quebec families between 2005 and 2008. To be eligible, children had to be eight to ten years old and have at least one parent living with obesity, a design that deliberately targets families at elevated cardiometabolic risk. For the neighbourhood analysis, the investigators retained 326 Montreal participants with complete data at both visits, including 183 boys and 143 girls. The children were assessed twice: once in childhood at ages eight to ten, and again two years later in pre-adolescence at ages ten to twelve, a window when independence from parents expands and behaviour patterns begin to consolidate.

What makes the study technically notable is its insistence on objective measurement at both ends of the equation. Physical inactivity and sedentary behaviour were captured with seven-day uniaxial accelerometry, with children required to wear the devices for at least four days of ten hours or more. Excess physical inactivity was defined as averaging fewer than sixty minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity per day, the international recommendation for youth, while excess sedentary behaviour time meant spending more than half of accelerometer wear time below one hundred counts per minute. Screen time, by contrast, was self-reported through interviewer-administered questionnaires covering television, video games, and computer use, with more than two hours of daily recreational screen use classified as excessive. The correlations between the three measures were surprisingly weak, with screen time barely tracking either accelerometer-based outcome.

The neighbourhood itself was measured with equal rigour. Trained auditors walked the ten street segments adjacent to each family’s home, recording sidewalks, pedestrian aids, traffic calming measures, physical activity structures, signs of social disorder such as graffiti and vandalism, and whether buildings were exclusively residential. Geographic information systems added a second layer, computing within one-kilometre street-network buffers the number of parks, three-way or larger intersections, land use mix, rush-hour traffic exposure, and residential density. Seventeen distinct features in total entered gender-specific logistic regression models adjusted for age, parental body mass index, parental education, and area-level material deprivation.

The headline result concerns parks. Each additional park in a child’s neighbourhood was associated with lower odds of excessive screen time in boys and girls alike, at both ages, with odds ratios ranging from 0.70 to 0.81. This was the only neighbourhood feature that behaved consistently across every age and sex group, and it did so for screen time specifically, not for sedentary behaviour or physical inactivity. The authors interpret this as evidence that parks act as a competing activity: a green space down the street offers children something to do that directly displaces hours in front of a screen, even if the time spent there is not always vigorous.

Beyond parks, the picture fractured along gender lines. Among boys aged eight to ten, the presence of physical activity structures such as outdoor playgrounds was strongly linked to lower odds of excessive sedentary behaviour time, with an odds ratio of 0.44. Among girls, however, the protective features only emerged in the ten-to-twelve age group: more sidewalks were associated with lower odds of excess sedentary time, and living in an exclusively residential neighbourhood carried a dramatic odds ratio of 0.13. Yet the same girls’ environments contained apparent risks, with neighbourhood disorder and greater land use mix each associated with higher odds of excessive sedentary behaviour. The researchers caution that disorder and sidewalks are both hallmarks of denser urban environments, which give children more destinations they can reach independently, sometimes involving sitting-based activities like cafes.

Screen time among girls proved especially responsive to urban form. In the older girls, living in an exclusively residential neighbourhood nearly doubled the odds of excessive screen time, while greater land use mix cut those odds nearly in half. This echoes earlier work showing that girls with access to twelve or more youth-related destinations near home recorded 109 fewer minutes of weekly screen time than girls with three or fewer. Boys’ screen habits, by contrast, seemed largely indifferent to their surroundings, with only sidewalks and street intersections showing any association. The authors point to possible explanations: girls may be more likely to substitute screen time with social outings when destinations exist, while boys tend to use screens regardless of what the neighbourhood offers, and girls additionally face barriers such as parental safety concerns and fear of peer judgement that shape how they can use public space.

Perhaps the most sobering finding was what did not matter. Physical inactivity, the outcome with the clearest clinical guidelines, was almost untouched by any of the seventeen neighbourhood features. The sole exception was neighbourhood disorder among younger boys, which was associated with higher odds of inactivity. The authors suggest that young children’s activities are heavily orchestrated by parents, who may drive families well beyond the neighbourhood boundaries the study measured, so the local built environment simply has less leverage over whether a nine-year-old accumulates sixty minutes of moderate-to-vigorous activity. A systematic review cited in the paper reached a similar conclusion: built environment features predict adolescent activity levels far better than those of children.

The study’s behavioural trade-off framework offers the most provocative idea for policymakers. A park may reduce screen time by offering an alternative, yet increase sedentary time if it is used passively. Sidewalks may promote active transport, yet deliver children to destinations where they sit. These interactions mean that a single intervention, however well-intentioned, will not uniformly improve all movement behaviours, and may not benefit all groups equally. The authors highlight low-cost Montreal initiatives such as ruelles actives, which convert alleyways with traffic calming, greenery, and play facilities, as the kind of targeted transformation that could work, provided planners know which behaviour they are trying to change.

The context gives the findings urgency. In Canada, thirty percent of children live with overweight or obesity, and only two in five met physical activity recommendations in 2018, trends the World Health Organization has urged countries to confront as a cardiometabolic priority. In this cohort, the numbers worsened with age: physical inactivity rose from 68 percent to 79 percent between the two visits, average sedentary time climbed from 4.5 to 5.2 hours daily, and excessive screen time jumped from 53 to 70 percent. The authors acknowledge limitations, including a sample largely of Western European descent with socioeconomically advantaged families, and the risk of false positives across many tested models, though they note the consistency of key trends. Replication in more diverse populations is needed. But the core message stands: physical inactivity, sedentary behaviour, and screen time are not interchangeable labels for the same problem, and treating them as such risks building neighbourhoods that help some children while leaving others, particularly girls and boys in different ways, exactly where they started.

Subject of Research: Associations between neighbourhood built environment features and physical inactivity, sedentary behaviour, and screen time in boys and girls at risk of obesity

Article Title: Distinguishing associations between neighbourhood features and physical inactivity, sedentary behaviour time, and screen time in boys and girls

Article References: Lungu, A. A., Ghenadenik, A. E., Van Hulst, A., Mathieu, M.-E., Henderson, M., Kestens, Y., & Barnett, T. A. (2025). Distinguishing associations between neighbourhood features and physical inactivity, sedentary behaviour time, and screen time in boys and girls. Journal of Activity, Sedentary and Sleep Behaviors, 4(1), Article 8. https://doi.org/10.1186/s44167-025-00074-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s44167-025-00074-y

Keywords: physical inactivity, sedentary behaviour, screen time, built environment, neighbourhood, childhood obesity, accelerometry, parks, walkability, gender differences, QUALITY cohort, urban planning