Effects of Parental Involvement in Exergames Play on Physical and Mental Health on Overweight and Obese Male Adolescent

Effects of Parental Involvement in Active Video Games Play on Physical Activity, Psychosocial Beliefs and Parent-child Relational Quality on Overweight and Obese Male Adolescents in China

In recent years, with the rising obesity rate, overweight and obesity have become a hot issue of public health. As a sensitive and special group, teenagers shoulder the heavy responsibility of building the motherland, so their health is also the focus of scholars and experts. As a new type of sports game, active video game(AVG) has been proved by many studies to be able to effectively improve the sedentary behavior of teenagers, and can completely become a substitute for today's popular smart phones. In addition, due to the increase of overweight and obese teenagers, a series of psychological problems, such as anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem, also troubled this group. Some researchers can effectively improve the psychological status of the subjects through the intervention experiment of AVG. However, there are few studies on psychosocial beliefs at present, and the impact of psychosocial variables such as self-efficacy, social support and quality of life on overweight and obese groups is extremely important. Moreover, due to the impact of the COVID-19 epidemic, the relationship between family members will also change, especially the alienation and rigidity of the relationship between children and parents will show a significant growth trend. Therefore, this study mainly takes AVG play with parents' participation as the main intervention means to influence the physical activities, psychosocial beliefs and quality of parent-child relationship of the experimental target.

In this study, three groups, namely the control group (children did not engage in any AVGs play nor any other structured school-based PA programs beyond physical education), two experimental groups (parental involvement in AVG play and single-player mode). It should be noted that the parent involvement group requires one parent to accompany the child to complete the experimental task, while the single-person model and the child need to complete the experimental task under the parent's supervision. The sample is 13-14-year-old Chinese overweight and obese male middle school students. Researchers will establish three groups in the WeChat platform to facilitate communication with each group of experimental subjects.

A study of 73 previously inactive, typically developing children showed initially high intrinsic motivation to use an AVGs system, which disappeared by week seven of the survey. However, the overall results of a study indicate that the use of AVGs may have increased self-reported levels of PA in overweight or obese children over 12 weeks. Given that the group in this study is junior high school students in grade one or two, with heavy learning tasks, the research period is eight weeks.

Based on the articles, according to the characteristics of the Nintendo Wii, to increase the subject's compliance with the game and maximize the training effect, each gaming session consisted of the upper body, cardio,and sports games . Routines were pre-determined and varied daily, gradually increasing in difficulty throughout the program. AVG participants were tracked every time for individual progress in the two experimental groups by earning points and expending calories, which were continuously reported by the Wii console as the participants played. After each game session, the parents will export the data from the game console and send it to the researcher through WeChat.

Inclusion Criteria:

• The family needs to install a television and connect to the Internet
• The family has never purchased a game console similar to AVG before
• ensure that at least one parent has enough time to accompany his or her child to complete the experimental task in a week
• BMI percentile should be more than 85
• there are no other sports besides daily physical activities
• The parents of the subjects agreed with their children to participate in the experiment and were willing to participate with their children.

Exclusion Criteria:

• Clinically diagnosed with mental illness
• Clinically diagnosed chronic disease
• Relevant weight loss drugs taken within half a year