Our secondary analysis indicates that NSW children and adolescents who have healthy lifestyle behaviours, especially appropriate screen time and healthier diets, are less likely to experience psychological difficulties. For children and adolescents who met recommendations for screen time there was a significant and consistent benefit in terms of a reduced SDQ total difficulties score. The results for diet were slightly different for adolescents and children and showed some variation in the effects of the different dietary behaviours but indicate a benefit for meeting at least some dietary recommendations. Since even a small increase in the SDQ total difficulties score has been shown to indicate increased risk of diagnosed mental health problems (30), maintaining a healthy lifestyle may prevent the development of psychological difficulties or mental health problems in children and adolescents.
We demonstrated that of all the included healthy lifestyle behaviours, screen time above recommended levels was most strongly associated with a higher total difficulties score and therefore risk for poorer mental health outcomes. This is in line with other studies which have shown a relationship between greater screen time and poorer quality of life, depression and other mental health problems (9, 34–36). Amounts of screen time and mental health are related (3, 37), most probably bi-directionally: poorer initial mental health predicts higher screen time (and declining physical activity levels), whilst increases in anxiety are associated with increasing screen time (8, 38, 39). Compared to children, we identified that proportionally fewer adolescents met the screen time recommendations, in agreement other Australian population studies (22) and international findings (9). This reinforces adolescence as a particularly critical time for reducing mental health related risk behaviours.
We did not find a statistically significant association between physical activity and mental health, however we did observe a tendency for both children and adolescents who met physical activity recommendations to have lower SDQ scores. Some researchers have found evidence for an association between physical activity and lower rates of depression and anxiety, or more positive self-perceptions and self-esteem, but a review concluded that the evidence base is limited (3, 24). It may also be important to differentiate between types of physical activity since many studies showing a positive relationship used acute exercise sessions as the exposure variable (40) whereas we examined regular physical activity participation that met recommended levels. A similar need to examine activity types, intensity and contexts has been found in adult studies (41).
Adequate fruit and vegetable intake, and lower discretionary food consumption, were all associated with a lower total difficulties score, although somewhat differentially among children and adolescents. High discretionary food intake appears to be more important for the psychological health of adolescents, this is consistent with previous studies, which have also shown that discretionary foods play an significant role in adolescent mental health (42) (19, 20). In children, eating sufficient amounts of fruit was important for mental health, which has also been shown in a number of studies (2). A number of studies have found an association between an unhealthy diet and mental health in children and/ or adolescents, and while measures differed, high consumption of discretionary foods has often been used to define an unhealthy diet (4).
Few studies have examined in detail the contribution of fruit and vegetable consumption to good mental health (4). Oddy et al. noted a positive relationship for fruit and leafy green vegetables but not for other types of vegetables (20) while Renzaho et al found no relationship between vegetable consumption and SDQ scores, although they did not examine the effect of meeting guidelines for fruit and vegetables (43). Nevertheless, only a very small proportion of NSW children and adolescents are meeting the guidelines for vegetable consumption, consistent with our previous research in the Australian National Health Surveys (44), so our findings indicate that few children and adolescents are receiving the potential mental health benefits.
Over half of the children and adolescents met the screen time recommendations. This is based on parent self-report and it is likely that the amount of screen time use among children and adolescents in NSW is much higher than identified in the CPHS (22). Efforts should therefore be made to improve estimations of screen time use, particularly as the situation is likely to have worsened in recent years because of the proliferation of screen devices now used by children and adolescents. This study provides evidence of a relationship between meeting recommendations for healthy lifestyle behaviours and having better results on the SDQ for NSW children aged 5–15 years, and supports the findings of previous studies about the importance of these lifestyle behaviours for mental as well as physical health in children and young people (2, 7, 16).
Strengths and limitations
A key strength of our study is that we used the results of a validated child psychological difficulties questionnaire in a population sample of children and adolescents to examine if there were associations with important regular healthy lifestyle behaviours. Our analysis adjusted for a wide range of socioeconomic and family factors (such as parent’s education and single parent families) which are independently associated with diet, physical activity and overall healthy lifestyle. We also adjusted for BMI, as overweight and obesity is likely to be an important confounder in the diet and mental health relationship (45). These adjustments increase the reliability of our findings. We used the linear scale for the SDQ total difficulties score, rather than cut-offs for diagnosed mental health problems (30), since our aim was to examine whether differences in scores were associated with the healthy lifestyle behaviours. The SDQ is an appropriate tool for measuring psychological difficulties in children as it also captures issues less serious than diagnosed mental health problems, but the results can predict risk for the development of more serious problems. (30). The mean total difficulties score for our sample of NSW children was similar to the mean found for parent report in an earlier Australian study (31).
Our analysis, however, has some limitations. The proportions meeting the healthy food guidelines may have been slightly underestimated since the survey questions were unable to detect half serves and therefore the recommendations were increased to be a whole serve for a portion of the sample. In consumption guidelines for children, a serve of discretionary food is based on kilojoules, so the amount is different for each type of food and we were unable to take this into account. This may have resulted in underestimating the proportion of children meeting discretionary food guidelines. We were also not able to adjust for overall energy intake as this data was not collected.
Data were based on parent report, which may have over or underestimated diet and activity according to social desirability bias or lack of information (e.g. difficulty estimating physical activity during school hours). Self-reported data on screen time in adolescents shows a lower prevalence meeting guidelines (22), and psychological difficulties have been found more likely to be reported by children themselves compared to parents (31), suggesting that unhealthy behaviours and difficulties may have been underestimated.
In addition, there was a higher proportion of missing data for the screen time indicator (7%) compared to other variables and the questions used in 2012/2013 may not have adequately captured the full range of screen time activities, particularly leisure screen time on hand held devices, although this was likely far less common in 2012/2013 than now. Our data are cross-sectional and therefore reverse causality, or a bi-directional effect, cannot be ruled out.