I was very surprised when I looked at my data and saw such extreme differences among parents, in that around 27% in the low SES neighbourhoods report that there is a lack of safe parks and playgrounds in their neighbourhoods, compared to 9% in the high.
I think if you do want to encourage children to be active in their neighbourhoods, something needs to be done to address the issue of neighbourhood safety, so parents feel confident that their children will be safe outside. There are real hazards for children being outside, such as high-traffic neighbourhoods where children can be hit by cars. So there are real physical dangers to children's health in many neighbourhoods.
There is also the idea of a fear of crime, and crime in parks especially I think for many parents. One policy that could be implemented at the municipal level is to have supervised park hours, so maybe two hours after school there would be a parent or an employee of a community centre there watching, so that parents feel safer having their children in this environment for a couple of hours after school so they can run around and do activities.
I think we need to address the issue of safety and the neighbourhoods in which children are living to encourage physical activity.
I think transportation is one barrier, especially among children, to get to physical activity programs. A recent paper just published using the same data set that I used, the national longitudinal survey of children and youth, found that children where both parents are working full-time have higher rates of obesity and I believe less participation in sports. It is thought that with the parents both working so many hours, they cannot transport children to school. Funding, for example, for municipalities to hire a school bus and drop children off at their homes and pick them up might be one way to support families in having their children be active.