New Year’s resolutions are synonymous with the month of January — named for Janus, the Roman god of beginnings and endings. Legend suggests Janus may have been worshipped on the first of every month, which makes sense to me, because as a parent of school-aged kids, September feels a lot like January. (I can use all the divine intervention I can get.)

One of our family’s new-school-year resolutions is to get at least an hour of exercise a day. School administrators have been shifting time away from recess and other non-core subjects in response to the No Child Left Behind Act, which requires schools to ensure performance at grade level for reading and math by 2014. My younger daughters, for instance, attend a school where they get about 20 minutes of recess a day, and my middle-schooler spent most recess periods indoors last year (at the teacher’s discretion).

But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends 60 minutes of aerobic exercise a day for kids. Beyond the physical benefits, a five-year study of children who did 20 to 40 minutes of aerobic exercise a day found they performed better on tests and showed increased brain function. MRIs conducted on some participants found increased activity in the brain’s frontal lobe – similar to what occurs when children are mentally engaged in solving a task.

“Children assigned to an exercise (program) not only perform (better) on tests but show changes in brain function that suggest the brain is functioning more efficiently,” says Phil Tomporowski, a professor of kinesiology at the University of Georgia, and co-author of a forthcoming paper on the study with Katherine Davis of the Medical College of Georgia.

“Chronic exercise training seems to have positive impact on paying attention, not being impulsive, thinking things through,” Tomporowski says. “Parents should petition the schools to put more activity in the school day.”

From the parental side, exercise can greatly impact your pocketbook. It can improve your performance at work by boosting cognitive skills and productivity, and reducing stress and absenteeism. Regular physical activity lowers the risk of a multitude of ailments, from heart disease to diabetes to certain kinds of cancer — which are obviously expensive to treat, even for people who have health insurance. A Harvard study found medical bills are behind 60 percent of U.S. bankruptcies, and more than 75 percent of bankrupt families had health insurance at the onset of the illness.

Another resolution? Get more sleep. Kids age 6 to 9 years old need at least 10 hours of sleep; older kids, at least nine hours. Adults need at least eight. The CDC says insufficient sleep is associated with a number of chronic diseases and conditions—such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, obesity, and depression. See my Yahoo!Finance column on Thursday, August 20, for more tips to usher in a successful school year.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 19th, 2009 at 10:54 am and is filed under Money & Happiness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.