Original Article
Parental influences on parent-reported motor skills in young children with developmental disabilities

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dhjo.2020.100910Get rights and content

Abstract

Background

Young children with developmental disabilities (DDs) often experience motor skill deficits. Although parents play an important role in developing their children’s motor skills, the association between parents of young children with DDs and those children’s motor skills has not been widely studied.

Objective

The purpose of this study was to cross-sectionally examine the pathway by which parental physical activity (PA) support, explicit modeling, and child’s PA are associated with motor skills in young children with DDs.

Method

One hundred and thirty-five parents of young children (5–7 years) with DDs completed an online questionnaire which included questions about parental PA support, parental explicit PA modeling, children’s PA behavior and children’s motor skill variables.

Results

Pathway analysis was conducted to examine the pathways between parental tangible support and explicit modeling and motor skills in young children with DDs. The pathway analysis indicated that parental tangible support and explicit modeling are significantly associated with PA behaviors in young children with DDs, which in turn, are associated with their motor skills.

Conclusions

The results from this study suggest that young children with DDs may acquire motor skills by participating in PA. In addition, parents of young children with DDs can indirectly be associated with the motor skills of their children by supporting PA and becoming a PA role model. For parents of young children with DDs, increasing the PA behaviors of their children maybe away to improve their children’s motor skills.

Introduction

The development of motor skills provides a variety of benefits to children.1, 2, 3 It is widely known that motor skills are a prerequisite for physical activity (PA) including sport participation, which provides various health benefits such as cardiovascular and muscular fitness.4, 5, 6, 7 A systematic review including 13 studies found clear relationships between fundamental motor skill competence and PA during childhood and adolescence.8 The development of children’s motor skills accelerate in their early years as they begin to acquire, refine, and develop a range of gross and fine motor skills.9 Moreover, if children do not master the fundamental motor skills during their early childhood, it will be challenging for them to learn context-specific motor skills because of the proficiency barrier.1 Thus, it is necessary to pay attention to young children’s motor skill development in early childhood.

Unfortunately, young children with developmental disabilities (DDs) often experience motor skill deficits.10, 11, 12, 13 Young children aged from 5 to 10 years with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) showed significant gross motor skill delays when compared to their age-matched peers without disabilities.12 In this study, young children with ASD received statistically significantly lower scores on the TGMD-2 (gross-motor skill assessment) in both locomotor and objective control skills compared to children without ASD. Another study found that young children (7–10 years old) with ASD experienced delayed catching skills) and delayed core balance.13 Young children with ADHD often experience motor impairment that hinders their activities from daily living to academic performance.10 Hartman et al. (2010) found that young children (7–12 years old) with mild intellectual disabilities (ID) had significantly lower locomotor skills compared to children without disabilities, but had comparable object control skills. Thus, young children with DDs may not fully achieve the early benefits of appropriate motor skill development.

Physical activity (PA) participation has been widely known as a factor on children’s motor skill development6,7,14, 15, 16 Recently, a systematic review indicated that as young children participate more in structured and/or unstructured PA, young children will be more likely to have better motor skills.14 A study confirmed that the intensity of PA served as a moderator for the association between PA and motor skills in children.16 Specifically, this study indicated that high intensity PA (i.e., vigorous and moderate to vigorous PA) influenced the motor skills of children without disabilities but low intensity PA did not. Although there is evidence of the association between PA and the motor skills of children without disabilities, the influence of PA behaviors on the motor skills of young children with DDs has not been widely studied.

Parents play an important role in facilitating the PA behaviors of children with and without disabilities.17, 18, 19, 20, 21 Parents influence their children’s PA behaviors by providing PA support,17,20 becoming PA role models,22, 23, 24, 25 and doing PA together.26,27 In particular, a meta-analysis confirmed that parental PA support is an important factor in enhancing children’s PA behaviors.21 If a parent supports the PA of their child, the child is more likely to be engaged in those PAs (e.g., running or catching a ball) compared to children whose parents offer less support for PA and focus instead on other activities such as screen time. In addition to parental PA support, parental explicit modeling is an important support for the PA behaviors of children.22, 23, 24, 25 If parents have an intrinsic motivation towards PA and apply their behaviors to encourage their children’s PA, the children are likely to participate in more PA.22

Based on this accumulated evidence, it is possible that parents of young children with DDs are indirectly associated with their children’s motor skills by supporting their children’s PA. One theoretical perspective, the field of promoted action28, supports the pathway between parent behaviors and the motor skills of children, suggesting that parents have fundamental impacts on their children’s motor skill development by reinforcing the physical activities in which their children participate. In turn, children acquire motor skills through the repetitive practice of bodily movement during the activities.28 However, there is a lack of empirical research investigating the effect of parents on the motor skills of children, especially young children with DDs. In particular, without a comprehensive understanding of how parents impact the motor skills of young children with DDs, it may be difficult to promote those children’s motor skill development within the context of their families. The purpose of this study was to examine the pathway by which parental PA support, explicit modeling, and child’s PA influence motor skills in young children with DDs (see Fig. 1 conceptual model). It was hypothesized that parental PA support and explicit modeling would be associated with PA behaviors in young children with DDs, which in turn, are associated with the motor skills of young children with DDs. Moreover, it was also hypothesized that parental PA support would be directly positively associated with the motor skills of young children with DDs.

Section snippets

Method

The current study is a cross-sectional study, which used comprehensive survey assessments administered through the Qualtrics survey system (Qualtrics, Provo, UT).

Results

The majority of respondents were white/Caucasian female (96.3%) with an average age was of about 36 years. The average children’s age was about 78 months and 50% of children had autism spectrum disorder (for more details, please see Table 1). Descriptive statistics and correlation for study variables are shown in Table 2 and Table 3. Independent t-tests indicated no statistically significant difference between boys and girls in any study variable.

Discussion

The purpose of this study was to examine the pathway by which parental PA support, explicit modeling, and child’s PA were associated with motor skills in young children with DDs. The current study confirmed that parents of young children with DDs were indirectly associated with the motor skills of their children. Parental PA support and explicit modeling were positively associated with the PA behaviors of young children with DDs, which in turn were associated with the children’s motor skills.

Conclusion

The current study confirmed a pathway by which parents are associated with the motor skill development of young children with DDs. Parental tangible support and explicit modeling were positively and indirectly associated with the motor skills of young children with DDs. Parental tangible support and explicit modeling were associated with the PA behaviors of young children with DDs, which in turn were associated with their motor skills. Parental tangible support and explicit modeling showed no

Funding

None.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the parents of young children with developmental disabilities who participated in the survey.

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