As a sports parent, take away the pressure
Jamie and his grandfather go out to throw the baseball. It starts out as a fun way to share time together. Afterall, baseball is Grampa’s favorite sport. They start out having a good time, but soon Grampa begins giving Jamie pointers. “Hold the ball like this, tweak your arm like that.” The corrections begin to intensify and after a while of Jamie trying to perfect his technique according to Grampa’s instruction, Jamie says he doesn’t want to throw the baseball anymore. When Grampa asks Jamie why he wants to stop, Jamie says because he’s not having fun, to which Grampa retorts, “it’s not about having fun!”
Parents put their kids into sports for all sorts of great reasons. Participating in sports gets kids active, brings them into community, teaches them the value of hard work and being a member of a team, helps them learn how to come back after a mistake and, importantly, can be lots of fun. Yet, the pressure kids feel to achieve in sport can change the way they feel about sport and even about themselves.
Photo by cottonbro studio
Parents may also put their kids into sports for some of their own reasons. Just like with Grampa above, parents want to share the great experiences they had in sports with their children. Yet sometimes our culture’s craze about winning and achievement in sport can take over and turn well intentioned parents into a fanatical fans. Winning and excelling become more important than the experience itself. For some parents they may try to relive their own athletic careers enacting what psychology professor Jack Smoll, Ph.D., calls the “frustrated jock syndrome”. This is when our natural desire to identify with parts of our kids becomes excessive and the child becomes an “extension of the parent’s ego, where parents define their own self-worth in terms of how successful their child is.”
Parental Involvement – Finding the Balance
Parents naturally want to see their kids do well, and part of our job as parents is to guide our children into adulthood. Knowing how much to teach versus how much to let our kids learn from their own experiences is a fine balance. Sometimes our fear of our child’s failure and our ensuing empathy for any potential challenging experiences our child has clouds our involvement.
So we coach from the sidelines, yell at the ref, push our kids to work hard and practice more. As John O’Sullivan, founder of Changing the Game Project says, the “cognitive interference” of coaching from the sidelines can take a child out of the game. It can stall their creativity and prevent them from assessing the situation and solving the problem presented to them on the field themselves. It slows down their physical reaction time and takes away their ownership of their play.
For some kids, as Brent Raeth, Managing Partner of CatchMark SportsNet writes, the game can become “a battleground not just against the opposing team, but against the mounting pressure from [their parents].” Kids may begin to think more about themselves, their performance, the “goodness” of every move and how they are being perceived by others. Being in their heads like this takes them out of the game. The pressure they feel can also lead to burnout – they become emotionally exhausted, feel like they are never good enough and eventually lose interest in the sport. When the game becomes more about performance, fear or obligation than joy, why would they want to continue to play?
Photo by cottonbro studio
Excessive expectations, critical feedback and pushing kids to do better all come from a deep desire to help kids succeed. The thought is, isn’t it my job to help my child learn discipline, better technique and the rewards of success?
And in comes the balance. Too much parental involvement can lead a child to thinking their worth is contingent upon their athletic achievement. When kids begin to feel like their self worth is derived from outside accomplishments and approval of others, perfectionism and the need for outside validation can set in, and their mental health can decline. They begin to equate their identity with their performance. If their performance is not up to par, they begin to wonder if they themselves are.
As Asia Mape, founder of ILovetoWatchYouPlay.com, writes in her blog “Is the Pressure to Excel in Youth Sports Hurting Our Kids?”, “our athletes are taught from a young age that success is based on outcomes. You don’t add value if you’re not the best on the team, the star, the highest scorer, or the MVP. Success means starting, scoring, winning.”
Mindset and Fear of Failure
This sole focus on outcome and performance rather than effort can lead to a fixed mindset where the belief is that one has innate abilities that are static, and no amount of hard work and effort will change that. Along with this mindset comes fear of challenge and risk – if my abilities are fixed and I try something hard, what if I fail? What if I’m not good enough? People with a fixed mindset often don’t see improvement as an option. Yet taking on challenge is where we grow.
Parents are naturally reluctant to see their kids fail. Yet we have to recognize that growth comes from getting up after we fall. As Abby Wambach, former U.S. National Team soccer player said in her 2018 Barnard College Commencement speech, “We must embrace failure as our fuel instead of accepting it as our destruction.” Rather than wallowing in or hiding our failure, Wamack implores athletes to use it as their motivation to get better. The art of resilience is only learned through experiencing a fall and getting back up. If we shield our kids from failure by excessive intervention and feedback on how to improve, kids miss out on an essential life experience. Life outside our homes is filled with disappointment. We want our kids to be well practiced in moving on from it before they leave our homes.
Raising a child participating in any activity takes finesse, self awareness and sometimes restraint. We want to be cheerleaders, unconditional supporters and to provide the “right”
