Credit score: Unsplash/CC0 Public Area
When you used bodily lively modes of commuting to highschool, your kids are more likely to do the identical. A examine printed within the European Journal of Public Well being by the College of Jyväskylä, Finland, reveals an intergenerational hyperlink between mother and father’ and their kids’s faculty commuting habits. The researchers emphasize that lively commuting to highschool is a straightforward and sensible technique to incorporate extra bodily exercise into every day life.
For instance, strolling or biking to highschool will be an necessary supply of every day bodily exercise for kids and adolescents. Dad and mom play an necessary position in shaping their kids’s bodily exercise behaviors, together with commuting to highschool. Life-style habits, comparable to bodily exercise, are additionally usually handed down from one era to the subsequent.
This examine examined the connection between mother and father’ lively commuting to highschool of their youth within the Eighties and their kids’s faculty commuting habits in 2018.
“We found a positive, intergenerational connection between parents’ and their children’s active commuting to school,” says researcher Tuuli Suominen from the College of Jyväskylä.
The examine accounted for a number of background elements that affect faculty commuting, together with distance to highschool, faculty grade, residing space, gender, parental training and household earnings.
Though the noticed intergenerational connection was comparatively modest, it was nonetheless vital.
“Parents’ own experiences and attitudes towards walking or cycling to school influence how they support and enable their children’s physically active commuting,” Suominen explains.
“If they are familiar with walking or cycling to school and view it positively, they are more likely to pass that habit to the next generation.”
Parental affect is strongest in major faculty years
The intergenerational continuity of bodily lively commuting is especially evident in the course of the major faculty years. Earlier analysis has additionally proven that parental affect on kids’s bodily exercise and commuting habits is strongest when kids are youthful. As kids get older and acquire independence, parental affect diminishes, and peer affect turns into extra outstanding.
“Walking or cycling to school is an easy and practical way to increase daily physical activity. In view of the increasing physical inactivity among youth, it is essential to promote active modes of commuting through multiple strategies,” says Suominen.
Supporting and enabling bodily lively commuting can profit not solely the present, but additionally future generations, contributing to more healthy life and extra sustainable commuting practices.
The examine is a part of the bigger longitudinal Cardiovascular Threat in Younger Finns Research (YFS), which started in 1980 and was expanded to a three-generation examine in the latest follow-up in 2018. This examine drew on survey knowledge collected from two generations on faculty commuting and its determinants between the ages of seven and 20.
The information consisted of 660 parent-child pairs. Faculty commuting of the unique topics was studied between 1980–86 and their offspring in 2018, with consideration for each generations’ background elements comparable to distance to highschool, faculty grade, gender, residing space, parental training and household earnings stage.
Extra info:
Tuuli H Suominen et al, Continuity of lively commuting to highschool throughout two generations: the Cardiovascular Threat in Younger Finns Research, European Journal of Public Well being (2025). DOI: 10.1093/eurpub/ckaf084
Supplied by
College of Jyväskylä
Quotation:
Did you stroll or cycle to highschool as a baby? Your kids are more likely to comply with in your footsteps (2025, August 8)
retrieved 8 August 2025
from https://medicalxpress.com/information/2025-08-school-child-children-footsteps.html
This doc is topic to copyright. Aside from any honest dealing for the aim of personal examine or analysis, no
half could also be reproduced with out the written permission. The content material is supplied for info functions solely.
