Encouraging Physical Activity: Action Or Direction?

Children's physical activity level is decreasing globally. Habits acquired in childhood and adolescence tend to continue in adulthood. Therefore, to obtain individuals who do physical activity or sports, this habit should be gained in childhood.

It is necessary to understand the factors affecting children's lives to increase the physical activity level of the children and make the active lifestyle a habit. These factors can be divided into the environment and family. It is the place where the family socialization process begins first and social norms and cultural values are learned. Parents can be more effective than the environment because they are the main decision-makers on the child. Parents configure the child's time, duties, provide the sports equipment to their child, transfer them for activity. They can support an active lifestyle by taking role models by children. Role modeling is defined as the child's behaviors of observation and social learning and their parents' behavior. In a review, it has been reported that physically active parents encourage their children to have more activities and may have active children. Small-group studies using an objective method are limited in terms of generalizability. While determining the activity level of the child and the family, the fact that the families can respond biased for their children and that the mother or father can take a role model according to the gender of the child reduces the quality of the studies. It remains unclear how and to what extent parents affect children's activity levels.

The aim of this study is to compare the physical activity level of children between 9-14 years of age, who have similar physical activity awareness, athletes and physiotherapist parents