More Art, Entertainment
Linked to Healthier Kids

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Communities where residents spend more money on the arts, entertainment, and other forms of recreation also tend to be home to healthier kids, new research findings show.

Based on a comparison of counties in northwestern Ohio, researchers found that the county where people spent the most money on recreation also had the highest rate of extremely healthy children.

In contrast, residents of the county that was home to the lowest percentage of extremely healthy children spent markedly less on arts, education, and other similar activities.

"Our data suggest that access to arts and entertainment improves children's health," study author Dr. Mary A. M. Rogers of the Medical College of Ohio, Toledo told Reuters Health.

As such, helping children in a community stay healthy might be as simple as encouraging your neighbors to have more fun, she added.

"We would like to see communities consider encouraging arts, entertainment and recreation for their residents," Rogers said.

Rogers and her colleague Dr. Emily Zaragoza-Lao obtained their findings by adding up revenues from all businesses involved in arts and entertainment within each county. These businesses included museums, zoos, parks, spectator sports and sports in which residents participate, such as bowling, miniature golf, and roller skating.

The total amount of revenues for this industry in each county was divided by the number of residents in the county to obtain the amount of spending on recreation per person.

Rogers and Zaragoza-Lao measured the health of children in different counties by calling more than 1,000 people, and asking them to describe the health of children in their families as either excellent, very good, good, fair, or poor.

The researchers discovered that children who were reported to be in excellent health lived in counties where recreational businesses earned an average of $304 per resident each year. In contrast, kids whose health was fair or poor resided in communities where recreational businesses earned an annual amount of only $161 per resident.

The county with the highest rate of kids in excellent health (83%) was also the region where arts and entertainment businesses earned the most, reporting $2,084 of revenue per resident each year.

Recreational businesses in the county with the lowest rate of kids in excellent health earned only $52 per resident each year, Rogers and Zaragoza-Lao report in the February issue of the American Journal of Public Health.

Rogers said in an interview that the current study cannot explain why more money spent on fun is linked to the health of children. She noted that many of the recreational activities involve physical activity, and children who are physically fit are often healthier than others.

And simply enabling a child to have fun more often could improve health, Rogers added.

"We know that there is a link between stress and disease. Recreational experiences may relieve stress and serve to strengthen ties between family members and friends," she said.

SOURCE: American Journal of Public Health 2003;93:288-289.

Reference Source 89

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