Objective: Family Compliance to therapists’ recommendations on home exercise has an important role in success of rehabilitation programs for disabled children. This study intends to determine barriers to compliance of parents with prescribed home exercises.

Materials & Methods: In present survey, parents of all of the 60 disabled children who were receiving occupational therapy, speech therapy or physiotherapy at Birjand’s rehabilitation clinics during September 2009 were interviewed. Data was collected using a semi-structured questionnaire, developed and validated by the researchers, containing questions about compliance and 21 barriers to compliance with recommended home exercises. Pearson chi-square test and Fisher exact test were used to explore the risk of parental non-compliance to recommendations in case of facing each of the barriers. Independent sample t-test was used to explore the correlation of number of barriers with degree of parental compliance.

Results: According to the study, the four main know abstacles consisting "lack of exercises devices in home" (P=0.003) "child’s (or cartaker’s) unwillingness to do the home exercises" (P=0.024). parent’s (or cartaker’s) concerns about child harming due to exercises (P=0.027), and Lack of necessary skills to perform the exercises (P=0.047) significantly increases the parents incompliance to home exercises. There was also a significant relationship between the number of perceived barriers and the degree of compliance (P=0.008).

Conclusion: It seems that designing exercises in a way that children would love them and emphasizing on helping parents to acquire the tools, knowledge and expertise would improve parental compliance to home exercise.