A087: A Study of Parents' Attitudes Toward Their Children's Participationin Extracurricular Sports Activities

<bold>Background/Purpose:</bold> Parental attitudes help to stimulate children's interest in sports and shape a positive and healthy attitude toward life. Based on the three dimensions of cognitive appraisal, affective experience, and behavioral intention of attitude theory, this paper conducted a multidimensional analysis of parental attitudes and analyzed the influence of different demographic characteristics on them. <bold>Method:</bold> This study used Wang Yang to prepare the Parents' Attitude Toward Sports Questionnaire. A total of 328 questionnaires were distributed and 312 questionnaires were collected. Demographic variables such as parents' different occupations, past sports experience, and education level were analyzed, and the data were processed with SPSS 26.0 to calculate the correlation between each dimension and parents' demographic characteristics. <bold>Results:</bold> There were significant differences in the attitudes of parents with different occupations and different sports experiences toward their children's sports participation (P &lt; 0.05); in terms of cognitive appraisal and affective experience, there were significant differences in parents with different education levels toward their children's sports participation (P = 0.003, P = 0.013); and in terms of affective experience and behavioral intention, there was a significant difference in the attitudes of parents toward their children's children sports participation by gender (P &lt; 0.05). Sports participation was significantly different (P &lt; 0.01); in terms of cognitive evaluation, parents' evaluation of their children's sports participation in different grades was significantly different (P = 0.01); in terms of behavioral intention, parents' intention for their children's participation was significantly different by monthly income (P = 0.02); and whether or not they were an only child did not make a difference in parental attitudes. <bold>Conclusion/Discussion:</bold> Physicians and parents with sports experience were more agreeable to their children's participation in sports. Parents with higher education levels were more supportive of their children's participation in sports activities. Pressure to go to higher education affected the level of parental support. Parents were more supportive of boys' participation in sports. This indicates that parents' occupation, past sports experience, and education level influence parents' attitudes toward their children's sports participation. This study and previous studies demonstrated the important role of parental attitudes in their children's participation in extracurricular sports activities. Due to the limitations of the sample size of this paper, there are still shortcomings, and follow-up studies should expand the sample size and continue to analyze the influencing factors of parental attitudes.