Parents and Children in Sports

(Paraphrased and copied with thanks to “A Parents Guide for Winning in the Youth Sports Game” by Dr. Goldberg)

Your child can benefit greatly by participation in sports.  But those benefits are not guaranteed.  They are made up of a cooperative effort among program administrators, coaches and parents. 

Through sports your child can:

1. Acquire an appreciation for an active lifestyle.
   

2. Learn how to work as part of a team.
   

3. Develop social skills with other children and adults.
   

4. Learn about managing success and disappointment.
   

5. Learn about fair play and being a good sport.
   

6. Learn respect for others.
   

These benefits come more readily when adults put the interests of the children first.

Children learn behavior from many different people, but the people they learn the most from are their parents.  Here are some tips to handling situations that involve competition. 

It is especially important to model good sportsmanship for your child.

1. Encourage all the participants.
   

2. Congratulate the opponents when they win.
   

3. Show support, interest and enthusiasm for your child at all times.
   

As well as helping your child, you can help your child’s coach by:

1. Resisting the desire to advise the coach on how to do their job.
   

2. Not coaching your child during training, a race or a competition.
   

3. Providing your child with proper equipment and encourage it’s correct use.
   

4. Thanking coaches, the race officials, meet organizers and other volunteers when the event is over.
   

How to be a winning parent:

1. Your child should never be taught to view his or her opponent as the “Bad Guy”.
   

2. Encourage your child to compete against himself/herself.  The ultimate goal of the sport is to challenge oneself and continually improve.  Winning in sports is about doing the best that you can, regardless of the outcome or the play of your opponent.
   

3. Do not define success and failure in terms of winning and losing.  If a child plays his/her very best and loses, you need to help them feel like a winner. 
   

4. Be supportive.  Do not coach.  Coaching interferes with your role as a parent and supporter of the team.  Be your child’s best fan - provide support, encouragement, empathy, transportation & money - but leave the coaching and instruction to the coach.
   

5. Remember the importance of high self-esteem in all your interactions with your child-athlete.  Athletes of all levels and ages perform in direct relationship to how they feel about themselves.  Make your child feel good about himself/herself and you’ve given him/her a gift that lasts a lifetime. 
   

6. Give your child the gift of failure.  The most successful people both in and out of sports do two things differently.  First, they are willing to take risks and therefore fail more frequently.  Second they use their failures in a positive way as a source of motivation and feedback to improve.  Failure is a perfect stepping-stone to success. 
   

7. Stress the process, (skill acquisition, mastery and fun), not the outcome.  In any peak performance, the athlete is totally oblivious to the outcome and is absorbed in the here and now of their actual performance.  An outcome focus will almost always distract and tighten up the athlete insuring bad performance.  If you truly want your child to win, help get his/her focus away from how important the contest is and have them focus on the task at hand.  Supportive parents de-emphasize winning and instead stress learning the skills and playing the game.
   

8. Avoid comparisons and respect developmental differences.  Comparisons are inaccurate and destructive since every child matures and develops differently.
   

9. Teach your child to have perspective on the sports experience.  The sports media would like you to believe that sport and winning and losing is larger than life.  This lack of perspective frequently trickles down to the youth sport level and young athletes often come away from competition with a distorted view of themselves and how they performed.  Parents need to help their child develop realistic expectations of themselves, their abilities and how they played without robbing the child of his/her dreams.
   

Most importantly, remember: The more fun an athlete is having the more he/she will learn and the better they will perform.  If your child is not having fun – investigate!  What is keeping them from having fun?  Is it the coaching & instructors, is it pressure or is it you?

Whose goal is it?  Is your child playing because they don’t want to disappoint you, because they know how important the sport is to you and are these goals and aspirations theirs or yours?  It is quite normal and healthy to want your child to excel and be as successful as possible, but you cannot make this happen by pressuring them with your expectations or by using guilt or bribery to keep them involved.  If they have their own goals and reasons for participating, they will be far more motivated to excel and therefore far more successful.