Associations between Parental and Friend Social Support and Children’s Physical Activity and Time Spent outside Playing

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the structural validity of a parent and a child questionnaire that assessed parental and friends' influences on children's physical activity and investigate the associations between the derived factors, physical activity, and time spent outside. Children (N = 154, mean age = 11.7) and 144 of their parents completed questionnaires assessing parental and friends' influences on children's physical activity. Children wore a pedometer for six days. Exploratory factor analyses revealed four factors for the parental and five for the child's questionnaire that explained 66.71% and 63.85% of the variance, respectively. Five factors were significantly associated with physical activity and five significantly associated with time spent outside. Higher correlations were revealed between “general friend support,” “friends' activity norms,” and physical activity (r = 0.343 and 0.333 resp., p < 0.001) and between “general friend support” and time spent outside (r = 0.460, p < 0.001). Obtaining information relating to parental and friends' influences on physical activity from both parents and children may provide a more complete picture of influences. Parents and friends seem to influence children's physical activity behavior and time spent outside, but friends' influences may have a stronger impact on children's behaviors.

Parental Correlates of Outdoor Play in Boys and Girls Aged 0 to 12—A Systematic Review

“…Additionally, two studies were identified from searches of reference lists, resulting in 25 articles. A posteriori, four studies [51,52,53,54] were excluded because they reported bivariate results only. Thus, finally 21 studies were included in this review, reporting data on 30 independent samples in total.…”

Parental Education and Pre-School Children’s Objectively Measured Sedentary Time: The Role of Co-Participation in Physical Activity

“…Co-participation in PA allows, not only direct parental role modelling, but also occasions for encouragement and support to develop motor skills and feelings of competence [ 20 ]. Several studies among school-aged children argue that frequent co-participation in PA increases children’s PA levels [ 22 , 23 ], although it is also stated that friends and other social environments may be more important to school-aged children’s PA than parents’ participation [ 24 , 25 ]. A greater role of parents may be expected among pre-school-aged children’s daily activity choices due to children’s early developmental stages [ 26 ].…”

“…The pre-school-aged child that is involved in PA needs parental involvement in reaching the places for the activity, some form of parental support in engaging the activity, and parental presence throughout the activity. Previous studies state that co-participation in PA as a family seems to be greatest during early childhood [ 24 , 25 ]. However, to our knowledge, only one study has specifically studied the influence of co-participation in PA on pre-school children’s activity levels.…”

A systematic review of methods to measure family co‐participation in physical activity

“…Validity against interviews for the child‐ and parent reported items were reported as an ICC of 0.24 with 51% agreement, and an ICC of 0.56 with 57% agreement, respectively. The factor analysis performed by Loucaides and colleagues identified one specific factor for ‘parental physical activity with child’ (i.e. co‐participation).…”