ALTON - It’s not what many kids want to hear right now, but the new school year is just around the corner. Even while the long days remain filled with summer activities, families are starting to make plans for the first day of school and the coming year. While it’s hard to know what might happen with the ongoing pandemic, hopefully this school year will feel more “normal” than the last two. With this return to school comes the chance to help our school-aged children to get back to more normal health routines. Some recent research highlights two areas families could focus on, including physical activity and youth vaccinations. One paper, appearing this July in JAMA Pediatrics, put specific numbers to something many of us have suspected: that children and teens the world over were less physically active during the pandemic compared to before. Overall, the study’s authors found that the daily level of activity in youth ages 3-18 dropped by 20 percent. That
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