Main results
This cross-sectional study contributes to the knowledge regarding young children’s PA patterns and its correlates. Our findings herein are an extension of our previous findings on 2-year-old children [
22], that young children vary their activity pattern over the days as well as between weekdays and weekends. Furthermore, child PA was inversely associated to parental education with a large effect size. No differences in PA between boys and girls was found.
In the present study, children were less active during weekends than weekdays which is in line with previous findings [
4‐
7,
22,
33]. During weekends children are primarily in care of their parents/guardian and one hypothesis may be that parents do not have the same time to activate their children or that they consider PA as something the preschools should provide [
33]. It has also been suggested that higher PA during weekdays could be due to the planned time for outdoor activities in preschools [
24,
34]. The hourly PA-pattern differed between weekdays and weekends indicating that the variability could be caused by exogenous factors and that it might then be possible to influence the PA. The differences at 7 am and 8 pm might be explained by the fact that children sleep in during weekends and at the same time also stay up later at night [
35]. The hourly pattern most likely confirms that preschools, in greater extent than parents, engage children in activities that are more physically active and have a fixed schedule for meals and naptimes. To further examine the parent-child PA relationship a comparison between their PA levels and patterns should be investigated in future studies.
We did not find any effect of weight status on PA. Studies on school-aged children, adolescents and adults have found normal weight individuals to be more active and less sedentary than individuals with overweight and/or obesity [
9‐
14]. In preschoolers, there is a positive association between PA and a reduced risk for excessive increase in body weight and adiposity [
3]. However, to our knowledge, weight status has, at 3 years of age, not been established as either a determinant of PA nor an outcome of too little PA [
8].
Boys and girls were found to be equally active. In a review by Sallis et al. [
9], 80% of the studies reported boys to be more physically active than girls among children age 4–17. Wijtzes et al. [
31] reported sex-differences only on sedentary behavior but not on low PA or high PA in the same age group. Johansson et al. [
22] reported no differences between boys and girls aged 2 within the Early STOPP population. Analyzing and exploring PA within this cohort should for this reason continue, in order to establish if, and in that case when, differences in PA by sex starts. Why boys are being more active than girls has yet to be established. Many factors have been suggested; motor skills, biological age, physical maturity, participation in sports but also social and cultural norm behaviors [
36‐
42]. Most of these proposed factors applies primarily to older children however, motor skills could be a factor of interest for children younger than 4 years of age and should be considered to include in future studies.
Finding and targeting groups of individuals with risk for low PA might help improve effects of PA interventions [
1]. As the predominant risk for childhood obesity [
19,
20] parental weight could therefore be a target of interest. Meaning, if parental weight status correlates to children’s PA, children to parents with obesity might benefit from PA-interventions and the added knowledge may make interventions more efficient. However, in this study we could not find differences in PA by parental weight status and to the best of our knowledge no other study has investigated this in 3-year-old children. Previously Johansson et al. [
22] found no differences in PA among 2-year-old children with respect to parental weight.
We found that children to parents with a lower educational level were more active on weekdays than their counterparts, with a large effect size. Previous results have been inconsistent and contradictory. In children from 6 years of age SES has in some studies been associated with PA [
7,
8,
15‐
18]. A systematic review showed that 58% of the included studies reported a positive relationship between SES and PA and the remaining reported the opposite or no relationship [
17]. The authors argue that studying this relationship is problematic due to the different types of measurements on both variables [
17,
30,
43] that is, subjective or objective PA [
17,
43] and various proxy for SES, for instance education, occupation and income [
30,
44]. This could lead to the contradictory results of the studies and could therefore make it somewhat hard to compare findings [
15,
17]. Even so, Beckvid Henrikson et al. [
15] also found that six-year-old children from families with low SES were more active and less sedentary, using objective PA and education as a proxy for SES [
15]. They discuss the possible implication of age on the differences in results, arguing that at an older age spontaneous PA is replaced with more structured sports [
15,
16]. Resulting in the strengthening of a positive relationship to SES, since the coast for activity increases [
15,
16]. Our results on 3-year-old children might cohere with their hypothesis that the correlation between SES and PA might differ depending on age.
Strengths and limitations
We used an accelerometer (Actigraph GT3X+) to objectively measure PA with a mean of 6.7 valid days, providing robust data [
25,
26,
45,
46] making us able to provide a picture of the children’s PA pattern hour by hour. Accelerometry is the suggested and most preferable method to be used when measuring younger children [
45]. Although wrist placement is not the most common wear placement it has been shown to increase the wear compliance among children [
46]. Using a uniform sleep-time for all children on both weekends and weekdays may be a source of uncertainty in the interpretation of the results. Nevertheless, children at this age often have regular hours independent of day of week [
35].
Due to the relatively small sample from the Stockholm area, the higher proportions of highly educated parents with mostly Nordic country background compared to the Swedish population [
47], the results should be interpreted with caution to other populations. Moreover, in this study we did not have information on motor skills or parental PA that might be of value for the total PA in this age group. Education as proxy for SES is the most commonly used, but using only 1 variable for a person’s SES is questionable and creating an index might give a more equitable estimation [
30]. However, there are no agreed upon definition on what variables to then include [
30].