"Get off the sofa and go and play": Family and socioeconomic influences on the physical activity of 10–11 year old children

Abstract

Background: Physical activity declines as children approach puberty. Research has focussed on psychosocial, environmental, and demographic determinants. This paper explores how family and socioeconomic factors are related to children's physical activity.

Parental influence on children’s physical activity in urban green spaces

“…In regard to parents' influence on children's PA, our findings show that those parents who participate in PA with their children was positively associated with children's frequency and duration of PA with a weaker relationship. However, in general meaning when we added the confounding factors, our results show that parents' physical co-activity was negatively related to frequency of children's PA in UGS, which means parents' participation in children's PA negatively affects frequency of children's PA. On the other hand, similarly to previous studies (Sigmund, et al, 2008;Brockman, et al, 2009;Zecevic, et al, 2010), we found that frequency of parents' PA with children was associated with frequency of children's PA and duration of parents' PA with children was associated with duration of children's PA in UGS. One of the possible explanations for the findings is that when parents take their children to parks or playgrounds for PA, they try to guard them due to the various concerns such as fear of traffic accidents, teenage gangs, or fear of strangers (Clements, 2004;Veitch, et al, 2006), parents may tend to limit children's visit to the UGS for PA. Alternatively, parents' responsibilities at home may have negatively affected frequency of children's PA.…”

“…Previous studies show that parents who are generally the primary decision makers for their children's daily schedules may be an important means for encouraging children to be more PA (Sigmund, et al, 2008;Brockman, et al, 2009;Zecevic, et al, 2010). Children who received more parental support for PA, for instance, were found to be 6.3 times more likely to be highly active than inactive (Zecevic, et al, 2010).…”

“…As previous research examined (Ferreira, et al, 2006;Hinkley, et al, 2008;Brockman, et al, 2009), we looked at the environmental, personal, and familial factors that may affect children's PA. In terms of environmental factors, our findings in both the bivariate correlation and regression analyses show that closer distance to UGS from home is associated with children's increased frequency and duration of PA.…”

“…The questionnaire's three sections were inspired by several other PA studies (Sigmund, et al, 2008;Brockman, et al, 2009;Zecevic, et al, 2010). The first part of the questionnaire asked demographic and socio-economic status (SES) (e.g.…”

The influence of child physical activity programs on parent physical activity in a rural community.

“…Strength of behavioral influence also appears to differ across parent-child dyads (for example, mother-daughter, mother-son, father-daughter, father-son) (Craig et al, 2013;DiLorenzo, Stucky-Ropp, Vander Wal, & Gotham, 1998). Financial constraints among lower SES families may decrease family support for and participation in structured physical activity programs (Brockman et al, 2009). …”