Parental behaviour and children’s sports participation: evidence from a Danish longitudinal school study

ABSTRACT

Parental involvement in their children’s organised sports has increased dramatically in the last decade. Recent debate has started to question whether parental involvement actually has a beneficial impact on child sports participation, and whether this is damaging for the children’s development of identity and autonomy. Prompted by this debate, we are using a longitudinal dataset of 1,096 Danish schoolchildren in the Municipality of Aalborg to explore the extent to which parental involvement or parental role modelling has a beneficial impact on children’s participation in organised sports. Our results suggest that parental involvement in children’s sport increases the likelihood that the child will participate in organised sports. When considering four types of parents, i.e. unengaged parents, servicing parents, self-realisation parents and super parents, our results remain unchanged. Further, we find that disadvantaged parents’ involvement increases children’s participation in organised sport whereas the involvement of advantaged parents’ has the opposite effect. From a policy perspective, embedding organised sport in a school context might be considered as a method of levelling the playing field.

KEYWORDS:

• Child sports participation
• parental involvement
• parental role modelling
• child fixed effects
• socioeconomic background

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 A methodological challenge is the endogeneity problem. In our analysis, the correlation between the error term and parental behaviour undermines a causal inference (Angrist & Pischke, 2009; Imbens & Wooldridge, 2009; Wooldridge, 2006).

2 One should be aware of the research claiming that parental behavoiur matters more when children are young, whereas peers matter more when the children mature into adolescence (Pot et al., 2016). In the present case, our results considering children in the 6th and 8th forms are most likely downward biased compared to if we had considered younger children.

3 The attrition rate was not significantly correlated with any of the variables from Table 1.

4 A child fixed effect approach requires observations from at least two periods in order to differentiate out any unobserved traits that are fixed over time.

5 For example, in 2011 89% of all Danish children age 7 till 15 years old participated in organised sports (Pilgaard & Rask, 2016).

6 For ease of interpretation, we use OLS to estimate the binary model (Hellevik, 2009). Cluster standard errors were applied in all models to correct for the correlation between observations, since children in the same school are subject to the same environmental and family background influences and therefore tend to have a correlated likelihood of participating in organised sports (Moulton, 1990).

7 Fixed effects models are an improvement compared to OLS regression. However, a major limitation of the model is that it only removes the factors that are fixed in places or over time, but not factors that vary regarding places or over times.

8 Results not presented here indicate that the impact of parental involvement is mainly driven by team-based, long-term involvement in a specific type of sport (results can be supplied upon request).

9 Results not presented here suggest that parental involvement increases the likelihood of frequent sports participation by 19.16 percentage points and the likelihood of participation for at least two hours on each occasion by 23.69 percentage points (results can be supplied upon request).

10 In our sample 21.99% are unengaged parents, 13.96% are servicing parents, 25.91% are self-realisation parents and 38.14% are super parents.

11 In line with Wheeler (2017), we use the concept ‘essential assistance’ rather than ‘natural growth’ as used by Lareau (2003) as it captures the necessary and basic involvement of disadvantaged parents better.

12 As selection into elite sport takes place at this age and as selection into elite sport is signalling successful parenting, parents invest heavily in their children’s sport to achieve this status (Quinto Romani, 2018; Nielsen & Olesen, 2014; Laub & Pilgaard, 2013; Olsen, Skrubeltrang, & Nielsen, 2015).

13 In contrary, to Bourdieu’s cultural reproduction, DiMaggio’s concept of cultural mobility seems to be an important mechanism.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Danish Council for Independent Research [grant number 12-127741].