Skip to main content

The Sports Parent – some tips to help you and your child



Sport offers so much to children psychologically: an opportunity to test themselves, to learn rules, to cooperate with others, to accept defeat, to celebrate success (hopefully), to cope with setbacks and much more. The Sports Parent who takes their child to practice, watches them play and then has to deal with whatever mood their child is in afterwards has a tough job to do. You face many dilemmas including: How much should you encourage your child to do the sport? When is your encouragement too much, at risk of being perceived as coercion or pushing them into it? How do you help your child cope with mistakes and bad performances? With other children, coaches, officials who show unfairness? Or cope with other parents who take a very different approach from you regarding how sport should be played by kids?

What makes your job as the Sports Parent all the more difficult is the fact that you really care about your child. You don’t want them to be upset. You don’t want sport to hurt their development. You don’t want them to leave sport with psychological scars for life to do with sport, exercise, body image, confidence or other people.

You want sport to be a positive experience, but how do you ensure this, or maximise the chance that it will be a positive one?

Well, the reality is that you can’t control all of your child’s experiences so that they are all positive and helpful. And actually, if you could do this, I’m not sure if your child would develop quite as well as one who lives in a world where at least some bad (with reason) stuff happens, where there is disappointment and challenges. The good news is that you can be a stable presence who gives consistent messages about them that can help. For example, your messages can include:
  • how they are doing well
  • how their performance has positives and negatives which is to be expected and fine
  • how their effort is important
  • how winning is great but not everything
  • how sport and life can offer challenges to persist with
  • how they are much more than their last performance
  • that they are fine, loved
By giving messages such as these, consistently, your child is much more likely to absorb and bounce-back from bad days on the playing field. They will then develop into a more psychologically robust child, adolescent and adult.

As a Clinical Sports Psychologist I have seen dozens of parents, with their children,  who have struggled to help their children navigate the world of sport by a safe and positive route.

Best wishes in sport and life

Victor

www.sportspsychologist.com

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How will athletes react to the news that lifetime drug bans might be overturned by the BOA before the Olympics?

BBC website announces today: ‘Former Olympic triple jump champion Jonathan Edwards is happy the British Olympic Association's lifetime ban for drug cheats looks set to be overturned.’ http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/olympics/17818958   Without going into how we as spectators think or feel about this issue, I’m interested in the impact that this issue might have on other competitors – those competing in the sports that the previously banned athletes compete in. Athlete A:   With a strong sense of right and wrong, Athlete A gets further fired-up and motivated to show the drug cheats that they are better, that they can win clean, expecting their performance to do the talking. This news of allowing, or potentially allowing, the banned athletes back in, is motivating, helping them prepare and perform. Athlete B:   With a belief that the sports officials, system or the world lets them down, Athlete B becomes angry at the developments. They may either get fired-up...
Post a Comment
Read more

Suicide in football: Players and managers: Gary Speed & Robert Enke

Sports stars, footballers and managers are human too. What I mean by this is life still happens to them. Challenging life events or experiences still happen. So, just like the rest of us, they end up in challenging relationships, enter into marriages that break-up acrimoniously, have loved ones who get sick with nasty illness, cancer or mental health difficulties. They can experience accidents and get into car crashes like we all can. Just like the rest of us. What we see is them performing on the pitch or under the spotlight. What we don't see is their life outside those 90-minutes a week, when they are training, at home, with their family, at the hospital…. We see them composed, focused, coping, performing athlete. This is what we expect. We don't see the struggles, challenges, emotions, arguments, angst, doubts, fears. Who expects this from high paid stars doing what we dream about doing? Sports stars are able (mostly) to cope with competitive pressures and they can appl...
Post a Comment
Read more

The psychology of big climbs: What’s going on in the mind of Tour de France cyclists and what we can learn from this?

What do professional cyclists think when they approach a climb? This depends on how they perceive their climbing ability, the challenge of the upcoming climb, the importance of their performance on this climb and their current sense of fatigue. If they perceive that they have the skills to do well on the climb, based on the gradient and length of the climb and the relative abilities of others, then they will approach with confidence. If instead, they believe that they don’t have that great an ability, then they may have some anxiety, trepidation, and worry with thoughts along the lines of: “This is going to hurt.” “I’m not good at this.” “I’ll get dropped.” So, how would a good climber approach a climb?   A confident rider approaches feeling calmer, more ready for the challenge, perhaps even welcoming and relishing it. They see it as a good test or a good part of the course. They may be thinking along the lines of: “Yeah, here it comes. Bring it on. This is my terrain. ...
Post a Comment
Read more