HOW
TO BE A WINNING PARENT
A
Parent’s Guide for Winning in the Youth Sports Game
Dr. Alan Goldberg
If you want your child to come out of his youth sports experience a winner
(feeling good about himself and having a healthy attitude towards sports), then
he needs your help! You are a vital and
important part of the coach-athlete-parent team. If you do your job correctly
and play YOUR position well, then your child will learn the sport faster,
perform better, really have fun and have his self-esteem enhanced as a result.
I-us sport experience will serve as a positive model for him to follow as he
approaches other challenges and obstacles throughout life. If you “drop the
ball” or run the wrong way with it, your child will stop learning, experience
performance difficulties and blocks, and begin to really hate the sport. And
that’s the GOOD news! Further, your relationship with him will probably suffer
significantly. As a result, he will come out of this experience burdened with
feelings of failure, inadequacy and low self-esteem, feelings that will
generalize to other areas in his life. Your child and his coach need you ON the
team. They can’t win without YOU! The following are a list of useful facts,
guidelines and strategies for you to use to make you more skilled in the youth
sport game. Remember, no one wins unless everyone wins. We need you on the team!
#1 When defined the RIGHT way, competition in youth sports is both good
and healthy and teaches children a variety of important life skills. The word
“compete” comes from the Latin words “corn” and “petere” which mean
together and seeking respectively. The
true definition of competition is a seeing TOGETHER where your opponent is your
partner, NOT the enemy! The better he performs, the more chance you have of
having a peak performance. Sports are about learning to deal with challenges and
obstacles. Without a worthy opponent, without any challenges, sports are
not so much fun. The more the challenge, the better the opportunity to
have to go beyond your limits. World records are consistently broken and set at
the Olympics because the best athletes in the world are “seeking together,”
challenging each other to enhanced performance. Your child should NEVER be
taught to view his opponent as the “bad guy,” the enemy or someone to be
hated and “destroyed”. Do NOT model this attitude!! Instead, talk to/make
friends with parents of your child’s opponent. Root for great performances,
good plays, NOT just for the winner!
#2 ENCOURAGE YOUR CHILD TO COMPETE AGAINST HIMSELF. The ultimate goal of
the sport experience is to challenge oneself and continually improve.
Unfortunately, judging improvement by winning and
losing is both an unfair and inaccurate measure. Winning in sports is about
doing the best YOU can do, SEPARATE from the outcome or the play of your
opponent. Children should be encouraged to compete against their own potential, i.e., Peter and Patty Potential. That is, the boys
should focus on beating “Peter”, competing against themselves, while the
girls challenge “Patty.” When your child has this focus and plays to better
himself instead of beating someone else, he will be more relaxed, have more fun
and therefore perform better.
#3 DO NOT
DEFINE SUCCESS AND FAILURE IN TERMS OF WINNING AND LOSING. A corollary to #2,
one of the main purposes of the youth sports experience is skill acquisition and
mastery. When a child performs to his potential and loses, it is criminal to
focus on the outcome and become critical. If a child plays his very best and
loses, you need to help him feel like a winner! Similarly, when a child or team
performs far below their potential but wins, this is NOT cause to feel like a
winner. Help you child make this important separation between success and
failure and winning and losing. Remember, if you define success and failure in
terms of winning and losing, you’re playing a losing game with your child!
#4 BE SUPPORTIVE, DO NOT COACH!! Your role on the parent-coach-athlete
team is as a Support player with a capital S!! You need to be your child’s
best fan. UNCONDITIONALLY!!! Leave the coaching and instruction to the coach.
Provide encouragement, support, empathy, transportation, money, help with
fund-raisers, etc. BUT... DO NOT COACH! Most parents that get into trouble with
their children do so because they forget to remember the important position that
they play. Coaching interferes with your role as a supporter and fan. The last
thing your child needs and wants to hear from you after a disappointing
performance or loss is what they did technically or strategically wrong. Keep
your role as a parent on the team separate from that as coach. AND, IF by
necessity you actually get stuck in the almost no-win position of having to
coach you child, try to maintain this separation of roles, i.e., on the deck,
field or court say, “Now I’m talking to you as a coach,” at home say,
“Now I’m talking to you as a parent.” Don’t parent when you coach and
don’t coach at home when you’re supposed to be parenting.
#5 HELP MAKE THE SPORT FUN FOR YOUR CHILD. It’s a time proven
principle of peak performance that they more fun an athlete is having, the more
they will learn and the better they will perform. Fun MUST be present for peak
performance to happen at EVERY level of sports from youth to world-class
competitor! When the sport of game becomes too serious, athletes have a tendency
to burn out and become susceptible to repetitive performance problems. An easy
rule of thumb: IF YOUR CHILD IS NOT ENJOYING WHAT THEY ARE DOING NOR LOVING THE
HECK OUT OF IT, INVESTIGATE!! What is going on that’s preventing them from
having fun? Is it the coaching? The pressure? Is it YOU??!! Keep in mind that
being in a highly competitive program does NOT mean that there is no room for
fun. The child that continues to play long after the fun is gone will soon
become a drop out statistic.
#6 WHOSE GOAL IT IS?? #5 leads us to a very important question! Why
is your child participating in the sport? Are they doing it because they want
to, for them, or because of you? When they have problems in their sport do you
talk about them as “our” problems, “our jump isn’t high enough,”
“we’re having trouble with our flip turn,” etc. Are they playing because
they don’t want to disappoint you, because they know how important the sport
is to you? Are they playing for rewards and “bonuses” that you give out? Are
their goals and aspirations YOURS or theirs? Flow invested are you in their
success and failure? If they are competing to please you or for your vicarious
glory they are in it for the wrong reasons! Further, if they stay involved for
you, ultimately everyone will lose. 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 reasons
and own goals for participating, they will be FAR more motivated to excel and
therefore far more successful.
#7 YOUR CHILD IS NOT HIS PERFORMANCE- LOVE HIM UNCONDITIONALLY.
Do NOT
equate your child’s self-worth and lovability with his performance. The MOST
tragic and damaging mistake I see parents continually make is punishing a child
for a bad performance by withdrawing emotionally from him. A child loses a race,
strikes out or misses an easy short on goal and the parent responds with
disgust, anger and withdrawal of love and approval.
CAUTION:
Only use this strategy if you want to damage you child emotionally and ruin your
relationship with him. In the ‘88 Olympics, when Greg Louganis needed and got
a perfect 10 on his last dive to overtake the Chinese diver for the gold medal,
his last thought before he went was, “1ff don’t make it, my mother will
still love me.
#8 REMEMBER THE IMPORTANCE OF SELF-ESTEEM IN ALL OF YOUR INTERACTIONS WITH
YOUR CHILD-ATHLETE. Athletes of all ages and levels perform in DIRECT
relationship to how they feel about themselves. When your child is in an
athletic environment that boosts his self-esteem, he will learn faster, enjoy
himself more and perform better under competitive pressure. One thing we all
want as children and NEVER stop wanting is to be loved and accepted, and to have
or parents feel good about what we do. This is how self-esteem gets established.
When your interactions with your child make him feel good about himself, he
will, in turn, learn to treat himself this very same way. This does NOT mean
that you have to incongruently compliment your child for a great effort after
they have just performed miserably. in this situation being empathic and
sensitive to his feelings is what’s called for. Self-esteem makes the world go
round. Make your child feel good about himself and you’ve given him a gift
that lasts a lifetime. Do NOT interact with your child in a way that assaults
his self-esteem- degrading, embarrassing or humiliating him. If you continually
put your child down or minimize his accomplishments not only will he learn to do
this to himself throughout his life, hut he will also repeat YOUR mistake with
HIS children!
#9 GIVE YOUR CHILD THE GIFT OF FAILURE. If you really want your child to
be as happy and as successful as possible in everything that he does, teach him
how to fail! The most successful people in and out of sports do two things
differently than everyone else. FIRST, they are more 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. Our society is generally
negative and teaches us that failure is bad, a cause for humiliation and
embarrassment, and something to be avoided at all costs. Fear of failure or
humiliation cause one to be tentative and non-active. In fact, most performance
blocks and poor performances are a direct result of the athlete being
preoccupied with failing or messing up. You can’t learn to walk without
falling enough times. Each time that you fall your body gets valuable
information on how to do it better. You can’t be successful or have peak
performances if you are concerned with losing or failing. Teach your child how
to view setbacks, mistakes and risk-taking positively and you’ll have given
him the key to a lifetime of success. Failure is the PERFECT stepping-stone to
success.
#10 CHALLENGE-DON’T
THREATEN. Many parents directly or indirectly use guilt and threats as a way to
“motivate” their child to perform better. Performance studies clearly
indicate that while threats may provide short-term results, the long-term costs
in terms of psychological health and performance are devastating. Using fear as
a motivator is probably one of the worst dynamics you could set up with your
child. Threats take the fun out of performance and directly lead to your child
performing terribly. IMPLICIT in a threat (do this or else!) is your OWN anxiety
that you do not believe the child is capable. Communicating this lack of belief,
even indirectly is further devastating to the child’s performance. A challenge
does not entail loss or negative consequences should the athlete fail. Further,
implicit in a challenge is the empowering belief, “I think that you can do
it.”
#11 STRESS PROCESS, (skill acquisition, mastery and having fun), NOT
OUTCOME. When athletes choke under pressure and perform far below their
potential, a very common cause of this is a focus on the outcome of the
performance, i.e., win/lose, instead of the process. In any peak performance,
the athlete is totally oblivious to the outcome and instead is completely
absorbed in the here and now of the actual performance. An outcome focus will
almost always distract and tighten up the athlete insuring a bad performance.
Furthermore focusing on the outcome, which is completely out of the athlete’s
control will raise his anxiety to a performance inhibiting level. So IF you
TRULY want your child to win., help get his 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.
#12 AVOID COMPARISONS AND RESPECT DEVELOPMENTAL DIFFERENCES.
Supportive parents do not use other athletes that their child competes against
to compare and thus evaluate their child’s progress. Comparisons are useless,
inaccurate and destructive. Each child matures differently and the process of
comparison ignores significant distorting effects of developmental differences.
For example, two 12 year old boys may only have their age in common. One may
physically have the build and perform like a 16 year old while the other, a late
developer, may have the physical size and attribute of a 9 year old. Performance
comparisons can prematurely turn off otherwise talented athletes on their sport.
The only value of comparisons is in teaching. If one child demonstrates proper
technique, that child can be used comparatively as a model ONLY! For your child
to do his very best he needs to learn to stay within himself Worrying about how
another athlete is doing interferes with him doing this.
#13 TEACH YOUR CHILD TO HAVE A PERSPECTIVE ON THE SPORTS EXPERIENCE. The
sports media in this country would like you to believe that sports and
winning/losing is larger than life. The fact that it is just a game frequently
gets lost in translation. 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
children develop realistic expectations about themselves, their abilities and
how they played, without robbing the child of his dreams. Swimming a lifetime
best time and coining in dead last is a cause for celebration not depression.
Similarly, losing the conference championships does not mean that the sun will
not rise tomorrow!
