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The following is issued on behalf of the Committee on Home-School Co-operation:
The Committee on Home-School Co-operation (CHSC) today (November 20) released the report of the survey on "Exercising Habits of Senior Primary and Junior Secondary Students and Parents" on the CHSC website.
The survey found that the amount of exercise taken by children was in direct proportion to the opportunity of their parents to exercise. The CHSC urged parents to act as role models by engaging in sports activities with their children to develop their habit of doing regular exercise and enhance parent-child relationship at the same time.
A total of 100 pairs of parents and their children from each of the grades from Primary Five to Secondary Three were interviewed through telephone polling. The 1,000 interviewees generally agreed to the importance of doing regular exercise and its positive impact on physical health, self-confidence and emotion. They hoped they could regularly take part in different kinds of sports activities and make exercising their personal hobby for their wellbeing.
The Chairman of CHSC, Professor P C Wong, said, "There is a high correlation between the degree of interest of their children and the rate of participation of parents in doing exercise. Generally speaking, the amount of exercise of students was generally higher than that of their parents. Male students and parents also exercised more frequently than their female counterparts. Coincidentally, for parents who did not spend any time on exercise, their children were more likely not to do exercise themselves.
"The report also showed one point which deserved our attention - senior primary students believed that appreciation and participation of their parents could encourage them to do more exercise. In order of preference, the types of sports taken by the students interviewed were basketball, running, badminton, swimming, soccer, table tennis and rope skipping. Many of these sports are also suitable for parents, so parents should try to spend more time with their children in doing their favorite sports activities," Prof Wong said.
About 85% of the students and 75% of the parents polled said that they did not encounter any difficulties in carrying out frequent exercise. This reflected that students and parents in general supported the idea of doing more exercise.
However, students who were overweight or with poor physical health held the opposite opinion. This might indicate that their negligence about taking physical exercise could lead to undesirable influences on them. Among those students who could not take any exercise at least once a week, approximately 70% considered heavy schoolwork as their major obstacle, and the rest said that they did not have interest in taking any exercise. For the parents who could not take any exercise at least once a week, approximately 80% attributed their failure to exercise to their devotion to career and heavy workload at work.
"Even though academic achievements and career are important to students and parents, they should not neglect doing exercise regularly. We cannot perform our duties effectively and efficiently if we do not have good health and self-confidence, and we should have the determination to squeeze some time for doing sports," Prof Wong said.
"The CHSC proposed that parents should help their children develop a habit of doing exercise on a regular basis at an early age. Parents should do more exercise with their children together. In doing so, they can help building up a good habit of exercising for themselves and their children, as well as a better parent-child relationship at the same time."
Professor Wong also proposed that schools mobilise parents to build up "Healthy Family and School". In addition to sports activities and physical education lessons, they could introduce different kinds of exercise like fitness dance and parent-child exercise as well as different kinds of parent-child activities like mini sports meet, games contest and fun day. Parent-child exercise and activities not only brought about good parent-child relationships but also enabled more communication and interaction between them. When schools and parents worked together to help students build up exercising habits, they were also working as a team in strengthening home-school co-operation and creating a harmonious society.
The research was overseen by CHSC vice-chair-persons and the co-ordinators of its Home School Information Working Group, Dr Paul S F Yip and Ms Emily F Y Mok. The executive summary can be found on the CHSC website (http://chsc.edb.hkedcity.net).
Ends/Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Issued at HKT 16:02
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