Not doubting the importance of physical activity, but poor mental health makes it significantly harder to maintain fitness as a child.
Often, school sports have minimum GPA requirements. A poor home life increases chances of mental illness and decreases chances that someone will drive you to practice. Will you even maintain the team sport if your teammates never accept you, given whatever mental condition that gives you anxiety or quirks? When can you even consider being active when much of the rest of your life is in shambles? You’re also less likely to have the ability to pay for it, given the correlations between low household income and poor mental health.
Poor mental health just makes everything harder to do, and you see that impact every aspect of life in aggregate.
The paper isn’t public so “controlling for confounders” is all you get, but I doubt they went through all the effort to have deep, revealing conversations about the home life or other nuanced cofounders of each participant.
Often, school sports have minimum GPA requirements. A poor home life increases chances of mental illness and decreases chances that someone will drive you to practice. Will you even maintain the team sport if your teammates never accept you, given whatever mental condition that gives you anxiety or quirks? When can you even consider being active when much of the rest of your life is in shambles? You’re also less likely to have the ability to pay for it, given the correlations between low household income and poor mental health.
Poor mental health just makes everything harder to do, and you see that impact every aspect of life in aggregate.
The paper isn’t public so “controlling for confounders” is all you get, but I doubt they went through all the effort to have deep, revealing conversations about the home life or other nuanced cofounders of each participant.