Walk your child to school or find a few other parents interested in organizing a "walking school bus."

Kids who walk to school have less stressful mornings, according to new research.

RODALE NEWS, EMMAUS, PA—School's just around the corner, and you've just finished your shopping for all those green school supplies. Now, fire up the laptop, log on to Google Maps, and find your child a safe walking route to school. A new study just published in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports and Exercise found that walking to school can help children cope with academic stress, which may lead to a few more straight-A report cards.

THE DETAILS: The researchers recruited 40 11- to 14-year-olds, 20 girls and 20 boys, and divided them into two groups, a walking group and a driving group. The boys and girls in the walking group were placed on treadmills and walked a mile while viewing a series of images of a tree-lined neighborhood that ultimately ended in images of a school, to simulate an actual walk to school. Children in the driving group sat in a chair for 10 minutes while seeing the same images flash by on a computer screen, to simulate being driven to school in a car. At the end of the "walk" or "drive," the children were asked to complete a computer test that challenged them in the same way a stressful test or assignment at school might. During each portion of the study, the kids' heart rates and blood pressures were monitored, and they were asked about perceived stress levels. Kids in the walking group showed fewer physical reactions to the stressful computer test—for instance, increased heart rate and blood pressure—than did the kids in the driving group, and when the experiment was over, members of the walking group said they felt less stressed out overall than those in the driving group did.

WHAT IT MEANS: Walking to school has a protective effect on children's mental health that shouldn't be overlooked, says the study's lead author James Roemmich, PhD, associate professor of pediatrics and of exercise and nutrition sciences at the University of Buffalo. "It's good for kids to use physical activity as a healthy way to deal with stress rather than other unhealthy behaviors, like eating energy dense snack foods, or sedentary activities such as TV, which act as a distracter," he says. "If you can get kids to be physically active early in life, it's more likely that they'll use physical activity later in life as well." And it's about more than just developing healthy habits, he adds. Stress triggers cardiovascular responses, such as increased heart rate and increased blood pressure, and those are risk factors for the early development of cardiovascular diseases, says Roemmich. Although children aren't developing cardiovascular disease now, he notes, the disease takes a lifetime to develop. "By dampening the initial response to an event that's stressful, you dampen the cardiovascular response, and you delay the onset of cardiovascular disease."