Corrigendum: Are Family Physical Activity Habits Passed on to Their Children?

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.741735.].

Associations Between Physical Fitness, Objectively Measured Physical Activity and Academic Performance.

There is evidence that physical activity (PA) can improve the academic performance. We recruited healthy adolescent girls, aged 11-12 years, and measured their PA with the accelerometer ActiGraph GT3X for the consecutive 5 days. Physical fitness (PF) was measured with eight motoric tests and three anthropometry measures. Academic performance (AP) was assessed for the six academic narrated school subjects. The results revealed that the girls were more physically active during the week days and less active at weekend (557 vs. 516 counts/min). Physical education grade shows the highest overall correlations with the results of the PF test battery (r = 0.53-0.95, p < 0.01). Nevertheless, correlations surprisingly decrease for the combined daily PA (r = 0.45), especially the weekend PA (r = 0.28). Grade point average and PF correlated moderately (r = 0.43-0.64), while they were moderate to high for PA (r = 0.59-0.87). Many questions arose after the completion of the present study and several new topics opened up, such as the question of how parental education affects the duration of PA and AP of the children and the influence of the place of residence AP of the children.

Are Family Physical Activity Habits Passed on to Their Children?

Studies of the familial association of physical activity (PA) and sedentary behavior (SB) have increased in recent years. However, there is a lack of studies that have objectively examined the correlates between parents, grandparents, and childrens' PA. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to measure PA using accelerometers to determine the extent to which PA and SB correlate among parents, grandparents, and children. A sample of 169 children between 11-14 years (77 boys and 97 girls), 225 parents (98 males and 127 females) and 52 grandparents (16 males and 36 females) were recruited for the current study. Accelerometers RM42 (UKK Terveyspalvelut Oy, Tampere, Finland) were used to determine PA levels of children, parents and grandparents. Epoch was set to 1 s. Mothers' moderate-to-vigorous PA (MVPA) was associated with children's MVPA (p < 0.05). After adjusting for age, BMI (child), and educational status, the results remain the same. Results of linear regression analyses for boys' sedentary time showed that fathers' sedentary time was significantly associated with boys (p < 0.01), but not with girls. The association of grandmothers' and grandfathers' MVPA activity with that of children showed that grandparents' MVPA, when adjusted for age, BMI, and educational status, was not a significant predictor (p > 0.05) of children's MVPA (total sample). In contrast, grandfathers' sedentary behavior was a significant predictor (ß = 0.269; p < 0.05) of children's sedentary behavior (total sample). The results of the current study suggest that parental involvement in PA, particularly by mothers, is important for children's PA and, accordingly, healthy outcomes.