Examining the relationship between preschool children'smotor skill levels and mothers' child rearing styles

At the beginning of the last century, new media, which provided opportunities to individuals with internet technologies, This research was designed in the descriptive relational screening model in order to provide the distribution between mothers' attitudes and children's motor development. The content of the research consists of a total of 112 people, 56 children aged 5 and 56 parents, who attend A-Fit Kids Academy in Aksaray province in the 2022–2023 academic year. The data were collected with an easy manipulation method. Descriptive analysis results indicated that participants exhibited high levels of desirable (positive) parental attitudes and low levels of undesirable (negative) parental attitudes. This suggests that parents generally adopt democratic, supportive, and involved attitudes toward their children. In terms of children's motor skills, gross motor skills were found to range from moderate to high levels, while locomotor and object control skills were observed to be at an average level. In analyses based on gender, although girls had higher average motor skill scores than boys, these differences were not statistically significant. This finding indicates that gender is not a determining factor in motor development. Moreover, demographic variables such as parents' educational level, income status, employment status, and number of children did not show a statistically significant effect on parental attitudes or children's motor skills. However, a trend was observed where desirable parental attitude scores increased with higher parental education levels. Correlation analyses revealed significant relationships between parental attitudes and children's motor development. Desirable parental attitudes showed a strong positive correlation with gross motor skills (rₚ = 0.945), and moderate positive correlations with locomotor (rₚ = 0.684) and object control (rₚ = 0.781) skills. On the other hand, undesirable parental attitudes were negatively correlated with all domains of motor skills, with the strongest negative correlation observed in object control skills (rₚ = -0.833). These findings indicate that positive parental attitudes support children's physical and motor development, whereas negative attitudes may hinder it. The results are consistent with existing literature and underscore the importance of parents adopting conscious and constructive attitudes to foster their children's physical development.