COVID-Era Sitting Rose Most in Children, Review Finds

COVID restrictions increased sedentary time across age groups, but children had the largest pooled increase: about 159.5 additional minutes a day. Adults aged 18 to 64 added about 126.9 minutes, while adults older than 65 added 46.9 minutes. Those estimates describe a period when schools closed, commutes vanished, and daily routines came apart. They do not prove that extra sitting caused the mental-health and physical-health problems that also appeared during the pandemic.

That distinction matters if you are trying to make sense of current movement habits. COVID-era data offer a useful benchmark for how sharply routines can change when work, school, transport, and social life move indoors. They are weak evidence that a specific amount of sitting creates a specific downstream health outcome.

The pandemic changed movement behavior at scale. The evidence does not isolate sedentary time as the cause of every health change that followed.

Children had the largest pooled rise in sedentary time

The strongest age comparison comes from a 2021 systematic review and meta-analysis by Adam Runacres and colleagues. It compared sedentary-time measures before the pandemic with measures taken during COVID restrictions in children and adults. The pooled estimates ranked age groups in a consistent order: people younger than 18 years increased sedentary time by about 159.5 minutes per day; adults aged 18 to 64 years by 126.9 minutes; and adults older than 65 years by 46.9 minutes.

The size of those estimates deserves some restraint. The review combined studies that used self-reported and device-based measures, covered different restriction periods, and came from countries with different policies. A pooled estimate can show a broad pattern without telling you that every child added exactly 159.5 minutes of sitting. Still, the age gradient is the best direct evidence here: children experienced the largest measured disruption, working-age adults followed, and older adults had the smallest pooled increase.

School closures likely removed movement that usually happens without anyone scheduling it: walking between rooms, recess, physical education, playground time, and the small bursts of activity built into an ordinary school day. Reviews of school-aged children and youth reached the same general conclusion. Paterson et al. reviewed 150 articles on children and adolescents during the first pandemic year and found a broad shift toward less physical activity and more sedentary behavior. Rahman et al. reviewed 14 studies of children aged 3 to 13; 93% were cross-sectional surveys, a design limitation that should temper precise claims, but the reported direction was similar.

Screen time rose widely, but sitting did not follow a perfect age gradient

National surveys add detail while also showing why screen time and total sedentary time should not be treated as interchangeable. In the French national ONAPS survey, sitting time increased in 36.3% of children, 25.5% of adolescents, 24.6% of adults, and 36.1% of seniors. Screen time increased in 62.0% of children, 69.0% of adolescents, 41.0% of adults, and 32.1% of seniors.

Those figures support a large youth shift toward screen-heavy sedentary behavior. They do not replicate the meta-analysis as a minute-by-minute age ranking. Children and seniors reported nearly identical proportions with increased sitting, while adolescents had the largest proportion reporting more screen time. The measures answer different questions: the meta-analysis pooled changes in time, whereas ONAPS reported the share of each group whose behavior worsened.

Parent reports from 490 Arab Israeli families point in the same direction for children. During the outbreak, parents reported less physical activity, more sedentary behavior, and longer sleep in their children in a 2023 cross-sectional survey by Rafat Ghanamah and colleagues. Parent report can miss or misjudge a child's total daily behavior, but the finding adds geographic breadth to the pattern.

For adults, work changed the arithmetic

More sitting during lockdown was not simply a story of people watching more television. In a longitudinal online study of Japanese company workers, total sitting increased from 8.96 to 9.53 hours per day between 2019 and July 2020. Workday sitting rose from 9.53 to 10.29 hours per day. The largest workday increase came from work-related sitting, and work-from-home days also increased.

That within-sample comparison gives the adult pattern more weight than a one-time survey, although it still cannot separate remote work from every other change occurring in 2020. The practical point is plain: losing a commute and shifting meetings, tasks, and social contact onto screens can add sedentary time without anyone consciously choosing a more sedentary identity.

A cross-sectional study of South American adults also found more sitting and screen exposure during lockdown alongside lower physical activity. A systematic review of university students found that most included studies reported less walking and more sedentary time during lockdown. These findings fit the broader pattern, but their designs mainly describe co-occurring behavior changes rather than establish why any one person changed.

More sitting did not explain every health change

Physical activity, sedentary time, sleep, work stress, social isolation, fear of infection, financial strain, and disrupted schooling changed together. That makes simple causal stories tempting and unreliable.

Cheval et al. found that self-reported worsening in movement behaviors during the pandemic was associated with worse self-rated health in participants from France and Switzerland. Association is useful information, but self-rated health and self-reported behavior can influence each other, and the study cannot identify sitting as the cause.

The strongest warning against overreach comes from a longitudinal study of Swedish adolescents by Gisela Nyberg and colleagues. It found unfavorable mental-health changes that were unrelated to changes in physical activity, sedentary time, and other health behaviors. Sweden's restrictions differed from stricter-lockdown settings, so this study is not a direct test of every country's experience. It does show that deteriorating adolescent mental health could occur even when changes in sitting time did not explain it.

Mitchell et al. used a longitudinal fixed-effects analysis to examine physical activity alongside other health behaviors during the pandemic. Its relevance is not an age-stratified estimate of sedentary time. Its value is methodological: movement behaviors changed together over time, which makes one-variable explanations less credible.

A 2025 cross-sectional study of Portuguese university students found poorer mental health associated with more sitting, more computer use for work or study, poorer sleep quality, and less vigorous physical activity in Silva et al.. That is compatible with a harmful cluster of disrupted behaviors. It cannot tell whether sitting worsened mental health, poor mental health increased sitting, or both reflected a third cause.

What remains uncertain

The evidence is strongest for acute disruption during restrictions. It is much weaker on persistence after reopening because few studies followed the same participants long enough to show whether added sedentary hours became durable habits. Cross-sectional surveys also carry recall and selection bias: people who answer an online survey may differ from those who do not, and screen time is often easier to remember than total sitting.

COVID-era sitting data are therefore context, not a treatment target. If you are assessing a child's, student's, or remote worker's current activity pattern, it is reasonable to consider whether pandemic routines shifted it. Do not use those historical shifts to claim that sitting alone caused later mood or health problems. The evidence supports a large, age-patterned disruption in behavior; it does not assign one cause to a crowded public-health event.