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Mental Health and Wellness
Being Mindful of young athletes psychological well being
Children today need to move more, and being on a team or involved in a sport is a great way to stay healthy. There has been much discussion about the physical benefits and risks that children face in sports, and with good reason; however more discussion is needed on the psychological risks and benefits related to youth sports. Listed below are six risks and six benefits that parents of athletes of all ages should consider as they help their kids navigate the world of sports.
Psychological Risks of Youth Sports
1. Self-esteem is tied to sport performance. Who your children are as a person shouldn’t be tied closely to the ability to hit home runs or score touchdowns. If it is, that’s a guaranteed set-up for feelings of failure and low self-esteem. Most young athletes feel great when they win, but it’s how they handle loss that defines their long-term character. Remind your children that they are always a winner in your book, even if they lose.
2. Delusions that sport will provide college scholarships. Too many parents believe that their child is destined to receive a Division 1 college scholarship. This is akin to playing the lottery: Don’t bank on it. Putting all your eggs in the sports basket is misguided and dangerous for your child’s emotional well-being. In addition to the statistical improbability, there is a strong chance that an athlete will face a sport-ending injury or simply burnout. Make sure that your athlete has other interests and doesn’t believe that sports are the only route to success.
3. Strained relationships with over-invested parents. Have you ever said “we won” after your child’s game or match? Don’t do it. Too many parents become over-invested in their children’s athletic pursuits, which can lead to behaviors that will hurt young athletes. Love and affection should never be tied to athletic performance. In fact, children need you most when they fail to perform well.
4. Unhealthy performance pressure. Sports psychologists are in high demand because parents, coaches, teams and schools put undo pressure on young athletes to perform well every time they step on the field, court, or track. Remember, they’re children, not professional athletes. Some days they will miss every serve just because, and other days they will look like they’re destined for greatness. Work with them to maintain perspective and understand that it’s only a game.
5. Inappropriate feelings of superiority. Our society’s obsession with sports puts a premium on athletes and athleticism, which can give young athletes an inflated sense of self. Parents need to be vigilant for signs that their young athletes lacks humility and empathy.
Psychological Benefits of Youth Sports
1. The ability to take criticism and work collaboratively. To help young athletes improve, coaches must point out mistakes and faulty technique. Learning to handle this feedback establishes a foundation for adult skill-building and collaboration. In addition, with their team and coaches, athletes learn the give-and-take of working together and managing conflict. Research suggests that athletic girls become women who are better equipped than their non-athletic counterparts to handle criticism and stress. Effective coaching and competition can help build internal resources that will serve kids well into adulthood.
2. Self-esteem and Efficacy. Skill-building in sport enhances self-esteem, which carries over into other areas of life. Gaining efficacy in one arena, especially when helped by a coach or a parent, demonstrates that listening and practicing yield positive results. This self-awareness helps young athletes make an invaluable connection between their goals and effort.
3. Acquisition of a Work Ethic. Sports require effort and commitment, both traits that serve us well in adulthood. Children apply the aptitude for hard work and effort that they acquire in athletics to almost everything they do in their lives, from hobbies to academic assignments. Excelling in sport is all about the work we expend, which sets up an excellent foundation for long-term success.
4. Positive Body Image. Sports can make young athletes feel proud of their bodies and what those bodies can do. Female athletes in particular have been shown to benefit from positive feelings about their bodies, regardless of whether they conform to society’s very rigid standards of female beauty.
5. Resilience. Too many tweens and teens are unable to handle the rigors of school. They are easily overwhelmed when they do poorly in a class. In fact, parents often protect their children from defeat by fiercely advocating for them, doing their homework, and even asking teachers to change poor grades. Overprotection undermines the development of resilience. Youth sports provide a nice balance, since parents can’t protect athletes from defeat and hardship. It’s good for your kids to learn how to both lose and win.
6. Self-Regulation, Organization, and Time Management. Combining sports and school requires an ability to self-regulate. Getting to practice on time with the proper equipment helps student-athletes learn to organize themselves and say no to other activities, such as video games, social media, and excessive socializing. Learning when to say no is a great skill to carry over to adulthood.
As parents, we should all be aware of the psychological risks and benefits that come with sport participation. Sports are supposed to be fun. When it stops being fun and has the potential to hurt your child, it’s time to shift gears and reevaluate. However, if your young athlete is having fun, the rewards can last a lifetime.
Marika Lindholm, Ph.D.
Guidelines and Strategies for you to use to make your child more skilled in the youth sport game.
If you want your child to come out of their youth sports experience feeling good about themselves and having a healthy attitude towards sports, then they need 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/her self-esteem enhanced as a result. Their sport experience will serve as a positive model for them to follow as they approach 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. Further, your relationship with him/her will probably suffer significantly. As a result, they will come out of this experience burdened with feelings of failure, inadequacy and low self-esteem, feelings that will generalize to other areas in their life. Your son/daughter and their coach need you on the team. They can't win without you! Remember, no wins unless everyone wins.
We need you on the team!
1. UNDERSTAND YOUR CHILD'S COMPETITION IS THEIR MOST VALUABLE TRAINING PARTNER
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 "com" and "petere" which mean together and seeking respectively. The true definition of competition is a seeking together where your opponent is your partner, not the enemy! The better he/she performs, the more chance you have of having a peak performance. Sports is about learning to deal with challenges and obstacles. Without a worthy opponent, without any challenges, sports is not so much fun. The more the challenge, the better the opportunity you 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/her 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 HIM/HERSELF
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. When your child has this focus and plays to better themselves instead of beating someone else, they will be more relaxed, have more fun and therefore perform better.
3. DON'T DEFINE SUCCESS AND FAILURE IN TERMS OF WINNING AND LOSING
A corollary to two, one of the main purposes of the youth sports experience is skill acquisition and mastery. When a child performs to their potential and loses, it is criminal to focus on the outcome and become critical. If a child plays their very best and loses, you need to help them 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 your 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, DON'T 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 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 your 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 the 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 a child stops having fun and begins to dread practice or competition, it's time for you as a parent to become concerned! When the sport or 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 going will soon become a drop out statistic.
6. WHOSE GOAL IS IT? IT'S YOUR CHILD'S SPORT!
Number FIVE 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, i.e., "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? How invested are YOU in their success and failure? If they are competing to please you or for your vicarious glory, then 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 THEIR PERFORMANCE - LOVE THEM UNCONDITIONALLY
Do not equate your child's self-worth and lovability with their performance. The most tragic and damaging mistake I see parents continually make is punishing a child for a bad performance by withdrawing emotionally from them. A child loses a race, strikes out or misses and easy shot on goal and the parent responds with disgust, anger and withdrawal of love and approval. When Olympic diver, 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, "If I don't make it, my mother will still love me".
8. REMEMBER THE IMPORTANCE OF BUILDING SELF-ESTEEM IN ALL OF YOUR INTERACTIONS
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 self-esteem, he/she will learn faster, enjoy themselves 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 our parents feel good about what we do. This is how self-esteem gets established. When your interactions with your child make them feel good about themselves, they will, in turn, learn to treat themselves 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/her feelings is what's called for. Self esteem makes the world go round. Make your child feel good about themselves and you've given them a gift that lasts a lifetime. Do not interact with your child in a way that assaults their self-esteem by degrading, embarrassing or humiliating them. If you continually put your child down or minimize their accomplishments not only will they learn to do this to themselves throughout their life, but they will also repeat your mistake with their children!
9. TEACH YOUR CHILD THE GIFT OF FAILURE
If you really want your child to be as happy and as successful as possible in everything that they do, then teach them 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 causes 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 them 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 mental 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 THE PROCESS, NOT THE 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 their anxiety to a performance inhibiting level. So if you truly want your child to win, help get their 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/her very best, he/she needs to learn to stay within themselves. Worrying about how another athlete is doing interferes with them doing this.
13. TEACH YOUR CHILD TO HAVE A PERSPECTIVE OF THEIR SPORT
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 coming 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.
Handling Disappointments in Youth Sports.
Disappointment is a normal, though difficult, natural response to failure, but some children react to their disappointment in ways that increase the likelihood of more failure and disappointment while growing up. Your children will inevitably experience disappointment in school,sports, the arts, and in their social lives. How your children learn to respond to disappointment will determine its impact on their future achievement and happiness. It is perhaps the most immediate emotion children experience after a perceived failure. Disappointment involves the feelings of thwarted desire, loss, and discouragement when children fail to fulfill their hopes and expectations-or those of others. Children are going to feel disappointment when they don't achieve their goals or believe they have let you down. These children who are faced with disappointment reduce their effort, give up easily, or quit all together. This reaction to disappointment can cause them to feel incompetent and inadequate, which, if persistent, will lower their self-esteem and may prevent them from achieving their future goals. Though some disappointment following failure is normal, children who are hit hard by disappointment mope around the house, look demoralized, and feel sorry for themselves for far longer than they should.
Our natural tendency when we see our children feeling badly is to try to make them feel better. Mollifying your children with excessive expressions of affection or by buying them gifts, though it may bring them some immediate relief and make you feel better, does far more harm than good. Children with no experience solving life's little setbacks have a much harder time when they're faced with the big ones." Your children need to be able to just sit with their disappointment and ask "Why do I feel so bad?" and "What can I do to get over feeling this way?" You can teach your children to see stumbling blocks as opportunities to improve and grow. Offering your children a different perspective on their disappointment-"I know it feels bad right now, but what can you learn from it?"-gives them tools they can use to avoid or minimize their disappointment in the future, and to turn the obstacles to their advantage by increasing resilience, motivation, and confidence. By staying positive and enthusiastic, you can show your children a better way of feeling in response to failure and guide them in finding a way to overcome their setbacks and return to their path of achievement.
Rather than the disappointment disheartening your children and causing them to feel bad about themselves, you can help your children use the experience to affirm their capabilities by showing them that they can conquer their past failures. You can also encourage her to keep working hard and express your confidence that her progress will continue. Your attitude toward your children's inevitable disappointments will influence how they responds to life's obstacles. If you also react with disappointment, you placing on their shoulders the burden of double disappointment: theirs and the realization that they have let you down. You should view your children's disappointments as positive experiences that prepare them for adulthood. You must convey to your children that failure and disappointment are a part of life and what matters is how they react to it. You can also give your children a boost by showing them that you believe in them, that they should have faith in themselves, and that if they keep trying, they will probably reach their goals: "Life is full of setbacks and disappointment, dear, but if you keep working hard, I know you can overcome them."
Here are some suggestions on how to respond to your children's disappointments:
· Allow your children to feel disappointment about the setback;
· Don't "spin" the situation to make your children feel better;
· Offer a healthy perspective on disappointment;
· Support your children, but don't give them a consolation prize;
· Help your children find ways to surmount the causes of their disappointment;
· Tell your children that they will survive these disappointments and will achieve their goals if they keep trying hard;
· Finally, make sure they know you love them regardless of their successes or failures.
Jim Taylor, Ph.D.
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