How To Support Your Kids on Sports Teams
Playing sports as a young person is a great way to get exercise, learn valuable skills such as leadership and teamwork, and have fun with friends. As a parent, you want to encourage all of these worthy goals. However, some sports parents take things too far. They put undue amounts of pressure on their children to succeed, or they become overprotective. They let their negative emotions take over at games and act in a way that they would never purposely encourage their children to.
All of these behaviors can ruin children’s fun and make them not want to participate in sports anymore. Here are some ways that you can support your child in sports in ways that are positive and constructive.
Provide Positive Reinforcement
Part of learning any new skill is accepting and applying constructive criticism, something that participating in sports can be effective at teaching children to do. However, if your children feel that all they get is criticism, no matter how kindly meant or positively it is phrased, it can be disheartening. They may feel that they can never do anything quite right.
Therefore, you should look for opportunities to praise what your child is doing right instead of just pointing out what he or she is doing wrong. It could be something as small and simple as holding a wooden baseball bat correctly, but if your child hears that he or she is doing something right, it encourages more hard work. Another way to positively reinforce your child is to praise him or her on how much improvement he or she has made, which can help temper the blow when you have to offer more critiques.
Educate Yourself
Of course, the advice to offer positive reinforcement and constructive criticism assumes that you are knowledgeable about the sport your child is playing to begin with. Not all parents are, and that’s not a bad thing in itself. It is good for you as a parent to allow your child to follow his or her own interests rather than to steer him or her in a direction that you may be more comfortable with but he or she may not have an affinity for.
You may be completely unfamiliar with sports in general or your knowledge may not extend to the game your child plays. In either case, there are many ways that you can educate yourself. There is information online and books about how to play certain sports and games. You can also learn by talking to your child’s coach or the parents of the more experienced members of the team. While even generic statements of encouragement can help your child, you can show that you care about what is important to him or her by learning about the sport and applying your knowledge constructively.
Identify Core Family Values
Define what qualities of personal conduct are important to you as a family, including kindness, integrity, and resilience. Explain to your child that he or she is to live these values at all times and not abandon them when he or she walks onto the field, the court, or wherever the competition is to take place. Sports are a reflection of life, and so it is just as important to practice these values during competition as it is to maintain them in other aspects of day-to-day living.
Practice What You Preach
Of course, if you emphasize the values of integrity and kindness to your children, you have to live up to the same standard that you have set for them. It is natural to feel protective and defensive when someone appears to wrong your child, but lashing out disproportionately over a ref’s call or whatever it may be is counterproductive. It usually doesn’t solve anything, it undermines your authority as a parent, and it sends mixed messages to your children regarding the values that you are trying to instill in them.
That is not to say that you shouldn’t speak up if another child is bullying or otherwise harassing your son or daughter. However, it is important to go through the appropriate channels to address this.
