Book Review: Physical Education and Well-Being: Global and Holistic Approaches to Child Health

This article reviews Lynch’s book, which aims at investigating and offering a comprehensive approach to the practice-based teaching of high-quality health, physical education, and well-being. The book is an excellent resource for educators, researchers, policymakers, and anyone interested in gaining fresh knowledge on contemporary childhood physical education, health, and well-being perspectives. Lynch notes that despite the importance of physical education, there is a gap in its practice, and its implementation needs to progress. Lynch (2019) adopts “education through movement” as the best approach to teaching health and physical education. The book focuses on analyzing global approaches to physical education and well-being by comparing four global regions/countries: Australia, the Middle East, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The results indicate that time was the biggest obstacle to health and physical education quality. American teachers indicated they needed more time to teach physical education and that incorporating health was a challenge. The author concluded that holistic physical education should be prioritized in schools because regular physical activity lessons can promote children’s physical fitness, health, and well-being. For children to enjoy optimum well-being, the author suggests that the sociocultural approach should continue across all countries. It is also crucial that holistic health and physical education policies become strongly integrated into the curriculum in every school, and that community partnership should be embraced in physical education.