Factors associated with television viewing time in toddlers and preschoolers in Greece: the GENESIS study

Abstract

The current findings suggest that almost one third of Greek preschoolers exceed the limit of 2 h/day TV viewing and that parental TV viewing time may be the most important determinant of children's TV viewing time.

Parent-child behavioural patterns related to pre-schoolers' overweight/obesity

“…Furthermore, our results are consistent with the findings of other studies (Jago et al, 2014;Kourlaba et al, 2009;Mendoza et al, 2007), which found that one of the most important behavioural determinants of young children's ST is the ST of their parents (Jago et al, 2014). However, our study complements this finding by observing different patterns for weekdays vs. weekends.…”

“…In accordance with other studies of parental proxy-reported sedentary behaviour (Cardon et al, 2016;De Craemer, Lateva, et al, 2015;Jago et al, 2014;Kourlaba, Kondaki, Liarigkovinos, & Manios, 2009), the Czech preschool children and their parents, regardless of gender and body weight level, showed higher ST at weekends than on weekdays.…”

“…However, the Czech pre-schoolers in our sample showed less daily ST compared with the US (Mendoza et al, 2007) and European pre-schoolers from Belgium, Bulgaria, Germany, Greece, Poland, and Spain (Cardon et al, 2016;De Craemer, Lateva, et al, 2015;Jago et al, 2014;Kourlaba et al, 2009) both on weekdays and at weekends. More specifically, the parents' proxyreported daily ST of Czech pre-schoolers on weekdays is lower by more than 20 minutes than the mean ST of the pre-schoolers from the above-mentioned six European countries (normal body weight: 51.7 CZECH minutes/day vs. 76.3 EUROPE minutes/day; overweight/obese: 49.7 CZECH minutes/day vs. 88.9 EUROPE minutes/day).…”

“…On the other hand, the Yamax Digiwalker SW-200 shows reasonable reliability and validity against accelerometry for children and also for adults (Cardon & De Bourdeaudhuij, 2007;Kooiman et al, 2015). Nevertheless, to minimize the rate of rejection of the voluntary participants in the study, the above-mentioned aspect and the following aspects with a potential effect on PA, ST, and overweight/obesity among preschool children were not investigated: family socio-economic indicators (completeness of families [Kitsantas & Gaffney, 2010]), level of parental education (Kourlaba et al, 2009), socioeconomic status (Kitsantas & Gaffney, 2010), or parental perceptions of the safety of the neighbourhood (Cerin et al, 2016). Another possible limitation is the use of the anthropometric values of the children indicated by their parents.…”

Sex differences in the variables associated with objectively measured moderate-to-vigorous physical activity in preschoolers

“…All others were coded as having moderate PA. This broader definition of parental PA was chosen as parental modeling for children is thought to play a role in activities of higher intensity and sedentary behaviors (TV viewing time) (Kourlaba, et al, 2009;Hinkley, et al, 2010) as well as transport practices (Cooper, et al, 2003). Children with immigrant backgrounds were those 1) with non-German nationality, 2) with parents (both) that had a mother tongue different from German or 3) that spoke a language other than German at home (Schenk, et al, 2006).…”