PARENTAL INFLUENCE ON THE PHYSICAL ACTIVITY OF ADOLESCENTS: SYSTEMATIC REVIEW OF CURRENT SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE

Introduction: Physical activity is important for child healthy growth and development. Physical activity decreases with child age, mainly during adolescence, when children have become independent from parental influences. Aim: to explore and understand how parents can positively influence the physical activity of healthy adolescents. Methods: We conducted umbrella review to synthetize the evidence from the existing systematic reviews published in electronic databases MEDLINE - Pubmed, Epistemonikos and Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews in 2009-2019. Narrative synthesis method was used to synthetize the evidence. Results: We identified 40 systematic reviews and nine of them were included in the qualitative analysis: four examined the parental influences on adolescents' physical activity and five analyzed the effectiveness of interventions involving parents. We found that parents could have positive influence on adolescent´s physical activity. Emotional support, by encouraging adolescents to be physically active, was the most important form of support together with the role of the father as a model of physical activity. Conclusion: Parents play an important role in promoting children´s physical activity even during adolescence. Interventions to support physical activity in adolescents should focus on education of parents about the importance of physical activity and training of social skills to support and motivate adolescents to perform physical activity.