Sports Education

When intervention is ill-advised

Let’s imagine your child comes home from practice one day, very upset. When you ask what the problem is, she responds angrily. "The coach got mad at me today for goofing around in practice. Now he says he won’t let me play in this week’s game! That’s very unfair! Other people goof off worse than me and he’s never benched them. But just because I pointed that out to him, I’ve got to miss the biggest game of the season! If I don’t play in this game, I might miss out on making All-Stars!"

How would you handle such a situation? Would you call the coach to apologise for your child’s behaviour and ask him to give the kid another chance? Would you argue with the coach that since your child has more natural talent than anyone else on the team, it wouldn’t be right to jeopardise her chances for selection to All-Stars over this one incident? Would you complain to the school head that the coach isn’t being fair to your kid and that he should be sacked? Or would you say to your precocious offspring, "Wow. Looks like you might have blown your chance, big-time. How do you plan to fix this situation?"

All parents have a natural, instinctive desire to minimise their children’s discomfort and make things easier for them. Children know this and very often over-emphasise their discomfort to get a strong reaction from their parents. Ever noticed how kids behave much better when they are with strangers, but are very touchy with their parents? When we see our children hurting — even if their pain is the result of their own actions — it’s hard for us not to intervene. However, in doing so we do them a major disservice. As author and former youth sports coach Tim Wendel wrote in USA Today: "…if a coach or any adult somewhere along the line doesn’t demand more out of a youngster, especially in terms of discipline and sportsmanship, the player will rarely pick it up on his own. Too many kids grow up believing that anything they do on the field is okay. In protecting them so much, parents make kids vulnerable to their own misguided actions…"

This opinion is not exceptional. Colleges report that the number one mental health problem among students today is anxiety. Researchers believe that one reason students are more emotionally fragile is because they are so shielded from the normal discomforts and disappointments of life, that they are unable to successfully cope with them on their own. Kids learn about the world around them by experiencing the good with the bad. Remember the classic line from the film Finding Nemo where Nemo’s father says "I will never let anything happen to you, Nemo". But Nemo finds himself through the tough experience of getting lost, struggling in an unknown environment and emerging stronger and more mature. Finding Nemo is a movie for parents as much as it is for kids!

Children who are encouraged by their parents to resolve problems on their own develop the confidence and self-esteem to successfully handle more challenging situations. On the other hand, children whose parents habitually jump in to solve their problems — with coaches, teachers, peers, etc — grow into ‘unfinished adults’ unprepared to negotiate conflicts and navigate the minefields of adulthood. In the contemporary urban context, with parents leading busy lives, it’s often very difficult for them to ‘let go’ as they are already fighting the guilt of not spending enough time with their children. Therefore when a child suffers a reverse they go overboard in trying to solve the problem, instead of letting her manage and sort it out, even if it involves an unpleasant experience.

Sports offer numerous natural opportunities for children to learn how to control their emotions and interact with others. Indeed, it is more through play rather than intellectual activities that children’s cognitive abilities develop the most. Through sports, children learn about negotiating hurdles, confronting competition, working hard to achieve their goals, about ‘figuring it out’ on the playing field. They learn — often the hard way — that if they don’t figure it out, they won’t be in the team. And the lessons and tears that flow from such challenges are necessary for children to understand the world, and find solutions to their problems.

Sport offers children great opportunities to become team players, leaders and good followers, set goals and work hard to achieve them. The best thing about sports education is that children love it. They play because they have fun and in the process imbibe important life lessons. However with coaches and parents exerting excessive pressure to succeed, children are starting to move away from sport into less competitive sedentary television, computer and video games which don’t provide equally fulfilling development environments. Too often children are asked whether they won or lost — not whether they had fun.

As parents, we need to make sure that we are not robbing our children of these crucial developmental opportunities. We need to allow them to experience, attempt, succeed and fail in order to mature into successful adults. If they are protected excessively, they will fail to thrive as human beings. It’s tough, but that’s what parenting is all about.

(Dr. George Selleck is a California-based sports psychologist and advisor to Sportz Village, Bangalore)