Investing in your child's sports education
Which of the responses below most accurately describe your feelings when baseball/cricket season comes around?a) Yippee! I can’t wait!
b) Oh, goody, here we go again.
c) It’s going to cost how much?
If you answered anything but (a) there’s a good chance that your child’s baseball/ cricket experience isn’t paying off for you.
Millions of families around the world make sizeable investments in the sports education of their children. I’m not talking about high priced trainers or the cost of filling up and equipping the van for all those road trips. I’m talking about the time and effort you invest as members of a youth sports community; about the value of the trade-offs you make to ensure that your child gets to play on Sunday mornings. These trade-offs could be in terms of family get-togethers that you skip or a weekend trek you were keen to go on. At some point you need to ask, "Is our investment paying off?"
How do you know when you’re getting your investment’s worth when it comes to your children’s sports development? How do you know you’re not spending your time and energy in the wrong direction? Should your child be learning music instead? (Here’s a clue: the answer has nothing to do with whether your child ends up with a scholarship or professional contract.)
You know your investment in time, money and energy is worth it when you can honestly claim that your child’s sports experience has helped to inspire, educate, and unite your family. You’re getting your time and money’s worth when your child’s sports experience helps him or her become a more mature, caring individual. You’re on the right track when the sports experience is fun for your entire family, and when it provides support for the values your family holds dear. It’s worth every bit of your investment when your child is healthy, active and develops a liking for sports and hence has a good chance of staying healthy all her life.
So, what can you do to ensure you’re getting that kind of return on your sports investment? As with any other investment, you stand a better chance of earning a return if you take the time to carefully research your investment and review the factors that will influence your rate of return and the growth of your human capital. This means researching your child’s sports programme, understanding the coach’s philosophy and goals. It requires talking to other parents with children in the programme, understanding what your child expects from the programme, what the team expects and figuring out how best you can contribute towards positive outcomes.
Once you have decided to invest, you need to take the time to monitor how your investment is performing. That means doing more than just turning your child over to a portfolio manager (the coach) and letting him or her handle your investment from thereon. While it’s true that most coaches do care about the individual development of their players, their focus naturally has to be on the team. The coach is measured by the success of the team and the number of tournaments it wins. Not by considerations like self-confidence, self-assurance and improved health of team members. That’s because the parents community as a whole doesn’t judge the performance of a coach on the basis of individual players and their development. The community derives pride when the team does well and plays well.
That is why parents need to have a more hands-on approach. This doesn’t mean they become intrusive, self-serving parents who make life miserable for the coach, other parents, and even their own children. By being a maturely proactive parent you can influence your child to respond positively to the challenges of her favourite game or sport, and you can influence her programme so that your entire family has a good experience. Your efforts can actually shape the values, standards and social climate of your child’s sports education programme. As an investor in your child’s sports development you are in a position to determine the extent to which your investment is paying off. It gives you the ability to make a difference.Sports education offers you the opportunity to stay connected with your children. When you show up for your child’s game, she realises that you value her play and athletic development. When you encourage her despite losing, your child learns key lessons about the values that your family holds dear. Moreover crazy schedules in a hectic world with moms going in one direction, dads in another and children in yet another, limit our chances to provide the critical support children deserve when they are growing up. So parents should recognise early enough that investing in their child’s sports education allows their relationship to grow in ways that make a definitive impact on her life. That beats making a killing in the stock market any day.
(Dr. George Selleck is a California-based sports psychologist and advisor to Sportz Village, Bangalore)