Areas › Your body › Moving your body
Children need to move before school, during it and after it. Keeping a child in at break until the work is finished takes the movement away from the very child whose finishing depended on it.
Break time is not the whole of it either. A few minutes on their feet between lessons, a walk before the day starts, something physical when they come home. If you are the adult who decides these things, guard them. If you are the parent, it is a fair thing to raise with a school, and raised as help with attention it tends to land better than raised as fairness.
Qur’an and Sunnah
When the prayer has ended, disperse in the land (Quran 62:10). Even the most focused stillness is given an ending and a getting up afterwards.
فَإِذَا قُضِيَتِ ٱلصَّلَوٰةُ فَٱنتَشِرُواْ فِي ٱلۡأَرۡضِ وَٱبۡتَغُواْ مِن فَضۡلِ ٱللَّهِ وَٱذۡكُرُواْ ٱللَّهَ كَثِيرࣰ ا لَّعَلَّكُمۡ تُفۡلِحُونَ
then when the prayer has ended, disperse in the land and seek out God’s bounty. Remember God often so that you may prosper
Qur’an 62:10read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A Cochrane review of exercise for children and young people found modest reductions in depression and anxiety scores, with the caveat that the trials were small and of variable quality. Separately, across studies of adolescents, more sedentary time, screen based time above all, went with poorer mental health, though the direction of causation is unresolved. Neither tested break time policy, so this is a reasonable inference and not a settled finding.
Lillebeth Larun; Lena Victoria Nordheim; Eilin Ekeland; Kåre Birger Hagen; Frode Heian (2006). Exercise in prevention and treatment of anxiety and depression among children and young people. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews doi
Hoare E, Milton K, Foster C, Allender S. (2016). The associations between sedentary behaviour and mental health among adolescents: a systematic review.. The international journal of behavioral nutrition and physical activity doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Moving lifts attention and self control for a while afterwards, and that while is when the next lesson happens.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
When you are low, the thing most likely to help is the thing you have least appetite for. Make the first step small enough that appetite is not required.
Learn a long sequence in small pieces and join them up afterwards. Nobody should be holding twelve steps in their head at once.
A movement practice comes apart into pieces: the shapes, the breathing, the noticing. On a day when the whole thing is beyond you, take one piece.