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Commentary: Sports participation at 4 years old? Thoughts on mental health‐risk trajectories in the longitudinal study of Australian children – a commentary on Vella et al. (2018)
Author(s) -
Crowell Judith A.
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
child and adolescent mental health
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.912
H-Index - 46
eISSN - 1475-3588
pISSN - 1475-357X
DOI - 10.1111/camh.12290
Subject(s) - mental health , psychology , longitudinal study , developmental psychology , psychiatry , medicine , pathology
Vella and colleagues (this issue) report on children in the kindergarten cohort of the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children ( LSAC ) study, using predictors from age 4 years to identify six trajectories of mental health risk from ages 4–12. Somewhat surprisingly, they find that among some predictable candidates for risk, such as sex and family income, that sports participation at age four emerges as a novel predictor of low difficulty with respect to mental health trajectories across the next 8 years. Is this a case of mens sana in corpore sano? Or is sports participation, that is, swimming, dancing, gymnastics, and team sports, a proxy for other factors? What can the various predictors and the trajectories of mental health risk from this longitudinal study tell us about interventions to reduce risk?