Parental perception and guideline awareness of children’s lifestyle behaviours at ages 5 to 14 in Singapore

: There are limited data on the descriptive lifestyle behaviour of school-age childrenin Singapore.Methods: A total of 100 parents of children ages 5 to 14 participated in a parents’ proxy-reportedsurvey. Frequency of moderate physical activity (PA) and vigorous PA was assessed, while t-tests orchi-square test was used to examine differences between weekdays and weekends for sleep, screenviewing time (SVT) and sedentary behaviour (SB).Results: Of the 100 children (68% of Chinese ethnicity, 59% boys, mean age 9.1±2.9 years), 31%were overweight or obese, with body mass index z-score of >1. For moderate and vigorous PAparticipation in a typical week, 32.0% and 43.0%, respectively, did not participate, while median(interquartile range) days of participation were 3 (2–3) days/week and 2 (1–3) days/week for a durationof 60 (interquartile range 30–120) minutes/session. When comparing weekends with weekdays, themeans (standard deviation) of both SVT and sleep duration were higher on weekends (SVT: 4.1 [2.9]versus 3.3 [3.1] hours/day, P=0.07; sleep: 8.8 [1.5] vs 8.3 [1.3] hours/day, P=0.02), while there wereno significant differences for SB. A higher proportion of children had SB of ≥10 hours/day and slept 0.05; sleep:18.8%vs 2.1%, P<0.05), while the proportion exceeding SVT of 2 hours/day were higher on weekends thanon weekdays (63.8% vs 45.4%, P=0.03). Overall, there was higher parental awareness of sleepguidelines (80.0%), but lower awareness of PA (51.0%) and SVT (59.0%) guidelines.Conclusion: Lifestyle behaviours were suboptimal in Singapore children compared with existingoverseas guidelines, indicating a need for an integrated guideline with greater dissemination.Keywords: Childhood and adolescents, integrated guideline, lifestyle behaviours, physical activity, screenviewing time, sleep