Sports Parents, We Have a Problem
Crying after sports is not healthy for child development.
Posted December 3, 2018 | Reviewed by Jessica Schrader
Like I said, sports parents, we have a problem. Want to know the problem? Well, look in the mirror. I don’t mean to insult you by indicting you as being the problem as an individual parent. I don’t know you or how you are with your children in their sports lives. I’m talking about the many sports parents who have been both seduced by and abet the toxic youth sports culture in which your children are now immersed. You know, the one in which results are all that matter for parents and children alike, even at a young age. And let me be clear: many children are suffering for it athletically and personally.
I am writing this article based on a disturbing experience that made this problem so glaringly evident to me. My painful epiphany occurred while attending a regional championship in a sport in which my younger daughter was competing.
Why were these young athletes so unhappy to the point of tears in sports that are supposed to be such fun? And keep in mind that these were kids younger than 12 years old, most of whom won’t even be competing in a few years because of their interest in pursuing other activities. I didn’t, of course, interview each one of the tearful young athletes. At the same time, I have seen variations of these kinds of reactions in my consulting practice for decades.
If you dig down one layer to examine the causes of such painful reactions in young athletes, you’ll find expectations and pressure, primarily from parents, but also from peers (by way of comparison rather than ill intent) and our intense youth-sport culture. The weight of expectations is a crushing burden on the shoulders of young athletes. Imagine your children having to put on a 50-pound weight vest when they enter the field of play and you’ll get a sense of what they feel and how it will make them perform.
If you dig down to the very heart of these reactions, you will find a fear of failure—specifically, that if these kids don’t perform well, they perceive that something really bad will happen (however objectively untrue it may be). Based on considerable research and my own work with young athletes, the most common causes of fear of failure include:
These beliefs produce in children a threat reaction that causes powerful internal changes including:
With this reaction, not only are kids pretty much guaranteed of not performing their best, but sports simply becomes a truly aversive experience.
Let me be clear that this problem isn’t even a sports problem. Rather, it’s a problem that permeates our results-obsessed achievement culture that you find in school, the arts, chess, anywhere in which kids can aspire to great success and where parents can become overly invested.
Now here is where I’m going to go on a rant, so be prepared. Mostly, importantly, my rant starts with a question: As a sports parent, do you want to be part of the problem or part of the solution? (This should be a rhetorical question.)
Here’s a simple reality: Kids under 12 years old shouldn’t be crying after they compete (in fact, no kids should be)! What so many parents and young athletes don’t realize is that results at such a young age (even up to 16 years old) just don’t matter. Sure, it’s great for young athletes’ efforts to be rewarded with good results. And it’s gratifying for kids to get attention for their successes.
At the same time, unless you’re one of the rarest of rare “phenoms,” results at a young age aren’t strictly predictive of later success; many “can’t-miss" kids do, in fact, miss). What matters in youth sports are not the results, but rather that young athletes have a passion for their sport, are willing to work hard and accept its inevitable highs and lows, and continue to develop physically, technically, and mentally in preparation for when it starts to matter in their late teens when college athletic scholarships and invitations to join national teams arise.
We wonder why so many kids are dropping out of organized sports by their early teens (about 70%, according to the research). This research has shown that the main reasons are that sports are no longer fun and they are too stressful .
We as parents and as a youth-sports culture are failing our children in a huge way:
We can’t change the sports culture. So, it’s up to us parents to shape our family’s sports culture and do the right thing for our young athletes. During this holiday season (and beyond!), give your children the gift that keeps on giving: your love and none of the crap.
Here are a few concrete suggestions (and I realize how tough they are to enact, but I can assure you that I’m walking the walk on every one of these with my two athlete daughters):
Want to be the best sports parent you can be? Read my book, Raising Young Athletes: Parenting Your Children for Victory in Sports and Life or check out my online sports parenting course .
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Jim Taylor, Ph.D. , teaches at the University of San Francisco.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.