Recent research suggests that kids may have a sort of set-point when it comes to the amount of physical movement they’ll do during the course of day. Researchers tracked the movements of two groups of kids. The first group got many hours of physical education during the school day, while the other group got very little.
The findings are remarkable: No matter how much P.E. they got during school hours, by the end of the day, the kids from the three schools had moved around about the same amount, at about the same intensity.
Given these parameters, I am going to estimate that my nine month-old daughter has a daily activity set-point of about 23 1/2 hours (she spends the other 30 minutes eating the remote and trying to come up with new and increasingly painful ways to remove my ear).
