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Kids are putting in so much screen time — on computers, watching television and playing video games — that a report card on physical activity levels among children and youth is taking direct aim at the situation.

Active Healthy Kids Canada gave an overall grade of D in its annual report Tuesday, but in some subcategories, including physical activity and screen time, it awarded a flunking mark.

For screen time, the grade fell from D-minus last year to F this year. The report says the average child in the 10-to-16 age group typically spends six hours a day in front of some type of screen.

• Join the Conversation Wednesday at 11:45 a.m. with Dr. Rachel Colley, who wrote the report. You can leave a question in advance.

The mark dropped because there's more evidence that Canadian kids are engaged in too much screen time, and new data indicate even preschoolers are getting high amounts of screen time, according to the report.

"This is displacing what would otherwise be active leisure time — it may not be (a) purposeful organized sport-type of thing, but it would be something other than sitting idle," Mark Tremblay, the organization's chief scientific officer, said in an interview.

"When you're sitting idle, your metabolic rate is very low, and in fact when you're watching television it's barely above that related to sleeping," he said.

"And so from an energy expenditure perspective, a muscle contraction perspective, this is not as good as even doing incidental movement."

For school-age kids in Canada and the United States, pediatricians' organizations suggest not exceeding two hours of screen time a day, and for preschoolers, one hour, the report says.

Much of the data on screen time come from the Health Behaviour in School-aged Children (HBSC) Survey of 2005-06 by the World Health Organization, Mr. Tremblay said, but various other studies were used as well.

The HBSC survey found that among Canadian youth in Grades 6 to 10, screen time on weekends worked out to seven hours and 25 minutes per day, while weekday time amounted to five hours and 56 minutes a day.

"This is for leisure time use," explained Mr. Tremblay, adding that it doesn't include homework and research for school.

Nancy Gyurcsik, an associate professor in the College of Kinesiology at the University of Saskatchewan, said young people and adults alike only have a certain amount of time for leisure activities.

"Partly what motivates us is what we value," she said from Saskatoon, commenting on the report card.

"What it says to me is that our youth are highly valuing screen time."

In one of her studies, she asked 221 girls about barriers to physical activity and no one mentioned screen time.

"We're labelling that as a barrier ... but the girls, the youths themselves, are not recognizing that as a barrier," Ms. Gyurcsik noted. "Maybe we need to have our youth more highly value physical activity."

Another aspect of the report card dealt with physical activity as it relates to the community and the built environment.

More than 90 per cent of parents reported having access to parks and playgrounds, and nearly 60 per cent said those facilities met their needs.

But only 34 per cent of parents reported actually using parks and outdoor spaces in their community, and just 23 per cent reported taking advantage of facilities and programs.

"The philosophy is that if you build it, they will come. And what the literature is showing is that if you build things, or if people have access to things, they're not necessarily coming," observed Ms. Gyurcsik.

It could be that people are busy and don't schedule the time, she suggested.

"What we need to do is get at 'why aren't they using them? What is the limiting factor?' ... Once we know that, then we can start to design interventions to help those people out."

Mr. Tremblay expressed the hope that this report will provide a reality check to parents and kids.

"If they're actually logging the amount of time they're on screens for non-productive work reasons, I think most people will be astounded," he said. "And [it] might be a bit of a wake-up call."