Neringa Strazdienė, Birutė Strukčinskienė, Sigitas Griškonis
Abstract
At younger school age it is forming a child personality, lifestyle habits, and children acquire necessary knowledge. Therefore, it is of importance to assist for a healthy and safe way of life in the early childhood. The family is a most important part of the child environment. Family forms health foundations, orienting and forming the behaviour and the lifestyle. The objective of the study was to investigate the primary school children’s living and health peculiarities at family level. A survey was conducted, and 530 parents of primary school children of 1-3 forms (aged 7 to 9 years) were investigated. It was found that the majority of parents tend to evaluate health of their children as very good or good. Only about one-fifth of families, growing primary school age children, live active lifestyle. A large part of parents for enhancing children’s physical health use vitamins and food supplements; more than half of the respondents toughen their children, and promote physical activities. Children’s mental health promotion ways are communication with the child and common decisions of the problems that arise. It was found that the families more often on weekdays than on weekends are eating in cafes, and in fast-food eateries. On weekdays, most of children for active games and outdoors sport spend about 1-2 hours, on weekends for these activities they allocate more time. On weekdays, about one-fifth of children spend up to 1 hour by computer or TV, and on weekends, this duration is longer. About one-fifth of children always follow up the agenda. A little more than half of primary school children go to bed at 20-21 o’clock. On weekends, children go to bed later, and only a very small percentage of children go to bed at the same time as on weekdays.
Keyword(s): primary school children; lifestyle; health promotion; family.
DOI: 10.5200/sm-hs.2015.064
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