Parental Guidelines For Young Athletes

Parental Guidelines for Young Athletes By Shaun Smith – Absolute Mental Training

Sports are great. They can teach your young children many of life’s toughest lessons; the joys of winning, the down of losing, not getting that job (getting cut from the team), the value of hard work and creating friendships. Although the benefits of sports cannot be argued the benefit of sports is often determined by the athlete’s parents. Parents are usually the most influential figures in a young athlete’s life. Many of our young athletes have been soured though by their parent’s reaction to sports. Young athletes look up to their parents and often will gauge their performances based on their parents’ reaction to how they played. But parents, how you affect your young athlete goes deeper then how you support your young athletes after a performance. Here is a brief document comprising a few pieces of advice that will help you to optimise your child’s experiences of sport. Start living these brief points and you will be ensuring that your young athlete will experience the positive results of playing sports. Here they are:
 Try to make your child’s experience of sport as fun and exciting as possible. Youth sports should be fun even after a loss. Often parents become consumed with the performance outcome of the competition that they forget that at a young age sport should be about enjoyment. Make it fun again for your young athlete and he will love coming to the sporting arena of choice every day.
 Don’t judge your athlete’s performance on the level of their performance. A successful game should be viewed as one where the young athlete has enjoyed their sport irrespective of their actual level of performance. At a young age, athletes are learning new skills. Just because Jimmy failed to pitch a no hitter or get a shutout does not mean that he will never make it as a professional athlete. He’s young, he’s learning, let him flourish and you will be thankful later.
 It is important to find out your child’s reasons for their participation and motivation in sport, rather than get stuck on your own. It is easy for parents to push their child for their own motivations, instead of letting them play for their own reasons. Regularly ask your children why they play their sport. You may be surprised to learn that they are playing because the equipment reminds them of being a robot or because they like to be with their friends. There is no reason for why your child plays sports unless the answer is because you want me to!
 A healthy and well-balanced lifestyle will impact positively on your young athlete’s performance. It is important to enforce a healthy diet, get the right amount of sleep, and develop the right balance between sport and academic commitments. Kids are growing! They need to eat right and get enough sleep to ensure that they can continue to have the energy to grow and play their sports. Don’t prioritize their sport above academic commitments regularly or you will be teaching them that school is not important. They may begin to hate school and want to quit when times get tough. All of these ingredients will help in building a successful young performer.
 As a parent it is important that you show respect for your child’s coaching staff, making sure that you maintain good lines of communication with them. Too often parents will voice their concerns or problems that they have with what the coach has done with their children. Your young athlete will feed off of this and lose respect for the coach or misinterpret what you have said about your coach to be negative and become confused if he should listen to his coach. If you have a problem with any of your child’s coaching staff, it is always to best to speak directly with the staff instead of taking matters into your own hands. Follow the following rule and you will keep your young athlete’s respect for their coach and have a good year: Never talk negatively about your coach or imply that your young athletes’ coach has done something wrong.
 Try to get your child to focus on being the best they can be, rather than focusing on being better than their fellow athletes and friends. Comparisons are very dangerous, because in sport there will always be athletes better than your child, and athletes that are worse than your child. Your child may think that he should get special treatment if you have compared him to his peers and become discouraged when he is not treated as the superstar that your comparison has created him to be. As well many young athletes may become frustrated because they will never be the best athlete in their sport. The chances of your child being the next great superstar like Wayne Gretzky or Tiger Woods is less likely than your chances of winning the lottery. Finally, many young athletes may begin to spend all their time comparing instead of playing the sport. The sport is supposed to be fun and by comparing constantly it becomes a competition not a arena to learn some valuable life skills and burn off energy. Try to get them to focus on their personal goals and achievements while ignoring the performances of others.
To conclude, parents you can have a huge impact of how your young athlete’s experience of sports goes. How you act and react before, during and after a sporting performance will have a huge impact on your young athlete’s enjoyment of sports in general. Next time that your young athlete is nearing his/her next sporting performance remember that the purpose of youth sport is to create an opportunity for the youths of our nation to have fun and grow. All the triumphs and heartbreaks that are part of winning and losing in sports can provide learning experiences and lessons that help pave the road to a successful adulthood. Remember they will eventually be looking after you!