Greek Parents’ Opinions and Attitude, Regarding the Physical Exercise of Their Children

The purpose of this paper is to record, study and analyze the views of parents in Greece, regarding the exercise of their children, the dependence of the parents’ opinion with their own participation in sports, the influence of demographic characteristics of parents in relation to their children's training, the factors which encourage and discourage them from participating in athletics and finally the general attitude of parents towards their children's training. In this research there are being involved 230 parents, 32.62% of which were men and 67.38% of which were women, from 35 to 45 years old. According to the survey results, the attitude of parents is quite favorable on to encourage their children to sports and the main reasons for this are the health and the fitness of the body, the teamwork and the pleasure - entertainment. In contrast, the most important reasons that make parents discourage them are the lesions and injuries from sports’ activities, loss of leisure time and the poor performance at school. In addition, the results showed that the only element that determines, to some extent, the level of the children’s physical activity is the mother's profession, while the degree of children’s training depends largely on whether parents exercised in the past, and not if they play sports now. Finally, there is a significant correlation between the child’s previous exercise and its present activity. It’s also being remarked that the more favorable the attitude of the parents towards the sports is, the more the level of the children's taking part in sports increases.