Forty-two percent.
That’s the share of British six-year-old girls getting the recommended amount of physical activity each day. The figure for boys at the same age is sixty-three percent. So before your daughter has lost her first milk tooth — before she’s read her first chapter book, before she’s been on her first sleepover — there is already a twenty-one-point gap between her and the boys in her class. And it’s growing.
I’m going to walk you through the research in a moment, because the details matter and the story is actually more hopeful than the headline number sounds. But before we go anywhere, I want to say what this piece is and what it isn’t.
It isn’t a piece about how girls should be more like boys. It isn’t a piece about pushing your daughter into something she doesn’t want to do. And it absolutely isn’t a piece about how every five-year-old needs to be on a structured sports timetable at the weekend.
What it is is a piece about a quiet, measurable, well-documented thing that is happening to British children between the ages of four and seven — particularly to girls — and about why the window of opportunity to do something about it is smaller than most parents realise.
If your daughter is somewhere between three and seven, this is for you. If you have a son in the same age range, much of it still applies. And if you have an older girl who’s already started to pull away from the playing field — there’s a section near the end that I think you’ll find worth sitting with.
What the researchers actually measured
A lot of the research about how active children are gets done badly. Parents are asked to estimate how much their child ran around last week. Children are asked the same thing. Both groups, predictably, over-estimate by a lot. A study based on what parents say their children do is a study about what parents want to believe their children do, which is not the same thing.
A team at the University of Cambridge decided to do it properly. (The full study is here if you want the detail.) They strapped accelerometers — small, lightweight movement sensors — to seven hundred and twelve six-year-olds, for an average of six days each. The accelerometers don’t care what the parents think. They just count movement.
What the data showed:
Just over half of British six-year-olds — fifty-three percent — meet the recommended sixty minutes of moderate-to-vigorous activity a day. That number alone is a national problem, but it hides something worse underneath. When you split the children by sex, the picture changes. Boys are doing significantly more than girls. The gap is largest during school hours. And although both sexes lose a little ground when they start formal schooling, the girls lose more, and they don’t recover it.
To put the school-hours finding in plain terms: the difference between how active a six-year-old boy and a six-year-old girl is, on a Tuesday in February, is mostly happening between nine in the morning and three in the afternoon. They go in roughly equal. They come out unequal. Then they go home, and on the way home and at the weekends, neither sex makes up the gap.
This isn’t, by the way, anyone’s fault. Teachers aren’t doing anything different to boys than they are to girls. Schools aren’t running secret boys-only PE lessons. The gap appears to come from a thousand small things — what kind of play is permitted at break, who feels comfortable running about in front of who, what messages children have already picked up about which bodies are supposed to be moving and which are supposed to be sitting nicely. By six. Six.
Why this is hopeful, not depressing
The hopeful bit — and there is one — is that at six, the gap is still small enough to close. We’re talking about a difference of about twenty minutes of moderate-to-vigorous activity a day. That’s one decent bike ride. One trip to the park where you don’t sit on the bench. A judo class or two.
A second study, this one following children from age three all the way to age seven, found that physical activity drops enormously between ages three and four — by about half — and then plateaus. Whatever level a child arrives at school with, they more or less stay at, give or take. (Study here.) Which means the years just before and just after a child starts school are the years when their normal level of daily movement gets locked in. The habit gets set. It is not impossible to change later. But it is much, much easier to set it now than to fix it at twelve.
So if there’s a window, this is the window. Three to seven. And it doesn’t take much. We’re not talking about turning your daughter into an athlete. We’re talking about regular, ordinary, weekly experiences of being moderately out of breath in the company of other children. That’s it. That’s the medicine.
Where this is heading, if we don’t pay attention
I want to walk you ten years forward, because the small gap at six is not the end of the story. It’s the start of it.
By the time your daughter is fourteen, here is what the research says is likely to be true if nothing has changed:
She will be dropping out of sport at roughly twice the rate of boys her age. (Women’s Sports Foundation data.)
Across the UK, an estimated 1.3 million teenage girls who once thought of themselves as “sporty” will have fallen out of love with it. The charity Women in Sport, which surveyed over four thousand UK teenagers, calls them the lost 43%. (Their full report is here.)
Sixty-eight percent of those girls say a fear of being judged is what stops them. Sixty-one percent say a lack of confidence. Seventy-eight percent say they avoid sport altogether when they have their period.
That last set of numbers is heartbreaking, but it’s also a clue. It tells you that the wall the teenager hits isn’t really about sport. It’s about confidence, body image, the fear of doing something badly in front of other people, and the deep belief — laid down years earlier — that sport isn’t for her. The teenager who quits at fourteen isn’t making a decision at fourteen. She’s continuing a pattern that started at six.
The girl who has spent the years from four to ten regularly doing something physical with other children — anything; it really doesn’t have to be judo — arrives at puberty with a fundamentally different relationship to her own body. She knows what she’s capable of. She has felt strong. She has fallen over and got back up. She has been one of the gang. None of these things stop puberty from being hard, but they give her something to stand on when it arrives.
The girl who hasn’t doesn’t.
Right — so what do you actually do?
Five things, all small, all things I see working with the families at our club.
One. Stop saying she’s “not the sporty one.” Children believe what their parents tell them about themselves, and they believe it earlier than most parents realise. If your daughter has heard, even casually, even with a smile, that she’s “not really the sporty one” or “more of a bookworm” — she has heard you sort her into a category. Children do not like being uncategorised. They will perform that category back to you for years. The same is true in reverse: girls who hear that they are strong, fast, good at trying things tend to keep trying things.
Two. Find a physical activity she can do without performing. The thing the research keeps coming back to is the fear of being watched. Seventy-three percent of teenage girls in the Women in Sport survey said they didn’t like other people watching them be active. This starts early. So if your six-year-old daughter freezes up in football because there are touchlines and whistles and other people’s parents shouting, she’s not “not sporty” — she’s reasonable. Try something where the watching is minimal: swimming, climbing, judo, gymnastics, dance, cycling. Anything where the point is the doing, not the performing.
Three. Move with her, not at her. Children, and especially girls, do much more physical activity when their parents are doing it alongside them rather than supervising from a bench. Walk to school. Cycle on Saturday. Go in the swimming pool with her instead of sitting on the side. A daughter who watches her mum or dad genuinely enjoy moving their body absorbs something about whose bodies get to enjoy moving. It is one of the most powerful and underrated things a parent can do, and it doesn’t cost anything.
Four. Don’t let her quit something the first time she finds it hard. This is general advice for any child, but it lands particularly hard for girls because the data shows girls are much more likely than boys to quit at the first sign that they’re not the best in the room. Half of girls feel “paralysed by fear of failure” during puberty, according to the Women in Sport data. The muscle of staying with something when it’s uncomfortable is built in primary school. Once your daughter has had one experience of I wasn’t very good at this, I stayed, I got better, I was glad I stayed — she has a template she can use for the rest of her life. That template is the gift.
Five. Look for somewhere she can be one of several girls, not the only one. This matters more than it sounds. A girl in a club where she is the lone girl in a sea of boys is going to find reasons to stop coming, even if she enjoys the activity itself. A girl who has two or three other girls of the same age there with her — even if she barely speaks to them — is far more likely to stay. When you’re looking at classes, ask: how many girls are typically in this session? If the answer is “she’d be the only one or one of two,” that’s worth knowing before you sign up.
The bigger picture
Here is the thing I want every parent of a young girl reading this to take away:
The twenty-one-point gap between six-year-old boys and six-year-old girls is not a fact about your daughter. It is not a fact about girls. It is the cumulative result of about a thousand small signals she has already received, in her first six years, about which bodies are supposed to be moving.
Every one of those signals can be countered. None of them are permanent. But they get harder to counter each year that passes, and by the time she is twelve, the room she is in has become much harder to change.
So the question is not really should I find my six-year-old daughter something physical to do. The question is what will the version of her at fourteen wish I had done now. The honest answer, which the research is now very clear about, is: something. Anything. Regularly. With other girls. With a coach or teacher who knows her name. Where she gets to feel strong.
The window is open. It will not stay open forever.
If you’d like to bring your daughter — or your son — along to try our SuperKids class for five-to-seven-year-olds (or any of our programmes), we run a 14-day VIP pass for £1 so you can give it a proper go before deciding anything. Both clubs, Knaphill and Merrow Village, run weekly.
And if judo isn’t your thing — genuinely, find your version. Swimming, climbing, gymnastics, dance, football, netball, whatever she’ll go to without dread. The activity matters less than the regularity, and the regularity matters less than the company. Pick something. Go.
— Vince
