Teens are getting lazier — but not for the reasons you think

Teens are scoring high marks in doing less.

An average of three out of four students are not getting enough physical activity, rates of which are shown to decline between ninth and 12th grades, according to a study of 360,000 high schools students by University of Georgia researchers.

It also revealed a strong divide along the gender line with only 35% of female students engaged in regular activity compared to 57% of male students.

But study authors blame education — not lazy teens — for their lack of regular exercise.

“The length of recess, physical facilities and social environments at schools have been found to affect physical activity among students,” said the study’s lead author Janani Rajbhandari-Thapa, an associate professor of health policy and management at UGA, in a statement.

Rajbhandari-Thapa has recently helped lead Georgia public schools in an initiative to increase health and physical education in the state.

“Over time, [Georgia] has observed declining levels of physical activity among all adolescents, but the rate is higher among female middle and high school students,” said Rajbhandari-Thapa, whose new study was published in the Journal of Adolescence.

The new research reinforces previous findings that gym-class requirements have been in decline in recent decades, as well as data showing that obesity among adolescents ages 12 to 19 has tripled since the 1990s.

Rajbhandari-Thapa suspects that a supportive social environment may be key to encouraging interest in sports and exercise among students, which means creating safe spaces against bullying and discrimination, among other cautionary measures.

“We do not know much about the role of school climate on physical activity,” said Rajbhandari-Thapa. “There must have been barriers that were faced by certain groups of students. Hence, we wanted to investigate the difference by gender.”

Rajbhandari-Thapa’s team measured a school’s “climate” against eight factors: school connectedness, peer social support, adult social support, cultural acceptance, physical environment, school safety, peer victimization (bullying) and school support environment.

Broadly, schools with more positive social climates yielded more physically active students, the study revealed — while the only gender-based divergence they found across the eight factors was bullying.

Notably, women who reported having been bullied in school tended to be more physically active than their less bullied counterparts — whereas men who experienced bullying were less likely to engage in school-based exercise.

Rajbhandari-Thapa suggested this particular statistic may coincide with society’s gender norms.

“For example, female students who are active in sports and physically active may not fit the gender norm and hence may face bullying,” she said.