FYC_NT_cover150Happy Fatherhood Friday!

I was recently contacted by Tamar Chansky, Ph.D. asking if I’d like to read and comment an article she had written that discusses the pressures and emotions that some kids have to deal with when it comes to youth sports. I say have to deal with because many times they are not given many options when it comes to participating in sports as kids. She offers eight fantastic strategies to helping kids become the resilient athletes that they need to become.

I have to say that Dr. Chansky has certainly hit the nail on the head with her description of what many of today’s youth endure in the name of sport. Kids today have parents pressuring them from every angle imaginable and sports are absolutely no different. For example she says:

It’s also clear that our culture is out of whack, witness the 5:00 am sports practices, travel tournaments for 2nd graders, and cut-throat competition for all. While rectifying these variables will certainly improve the outcome, it will not eliminate the problem of kids who fall apart in the face of defeat. Especially since many of these kids fall apart even with just the anticipation of defeat. So losing isn’t the real disaster for these kids, their relationship to losing is the disaster.

What is it with these parents? Personally I can’t help but think that really all they are doing is trying to make up for their own childhood as well as adulthood shortcomings. They aren’t really happy with themselves so they push their kids to be what they couldn’t. As a parent I fully understand that you want your kids to live up to their full potential and do incredible things with their lives, it’s completely natural, but a lot of times it really seems to go vastly overboard. Kids should not have panic attacks at the idea that they may lose or throw tantrums when a game doesn’t go their way.

Parents above all need to get used to the idea that at some point everyone loses. Once they learn this simple idea and help their kids understand this as well then everyone can simply enjoy the sport the way it is supposed to be enjoyed. No one likes to lose but it will happen, accept it! My wife and I have already talked to our oldest about losing and she’s 3! We tell her that losing will happen. We tell her that participating and having fun is what is important and she just needs to practice and learn from the losses so that they happen less often. It’s just a mental shift of the win/lose ratio.

Dr. Chansky offers up eight different strategies parents can use to help kids gain the proper perspective about losing and help them in the long run become better athletes by getting more enjoyment out of the game. Here are a couple that I feel particularly strong about:

Lower the Stakes, not the Standards: Separate your Child’s Value from the Outcome of the Game. Your child’s value as a human being isn’t at stake every time he steps on the field (it only feels that way to him), his value is a permanent possession. Don’t dispense with the importance of playing well, but dispense with the inaccurate interpretation of what it means to lose: ask your child what it means to him if he loses, and then ask him to think what it really means in life. What is the interpretation that the coach has? The other players? Even MVPs lose games and strike out — lots of games, lots of strike outs. It doesn’t mean you are a loser or even a bad player, it’s one moment in time. The outcome of the game is temporary and changeable, your value, permanent and only will improve with effort.

Find the Wins within the Losses and Learn from the Mistakes: While every game or event has winners and losers, the real loss is when your child doesn’t give credit where credit is due. Ask your child what went well. Don’t let her dispense with the credit just because it is easy for her. While your child is critical of the one thing she did wrong, she will be dismissing and devaluing the things they did well, because in the all-or-none game, if you can’t do it all, you lose. Not so. Look at professional athletes — the best hitters have the most errors, the best basketball players can’t master the free shots.

Help make the crisis an opportunity for learning how to improve: have your child analyze like a detective what went wrong and see if there are things to make it happen differently next time (practicing a particular skill, staying focused on the game).

Make sure you head over to Dr. Chansky’s websites too: www.freeingyourchild.com and http://www.worrywisekids.org They are fantastic resources for parents to deal with children’s anxiety over various issues. She has also written three books that look to be very informative. Personally I’d LOVE to read “Freeing Your Child From Negative Thinking”. Children need to learn positive thinking at a very early age says I. :)

Here is the link to the original article on Huffington Post.

I’d love to hear your feelings on this. Do you talk to your kids honestly about losing or should parents always make their kids feel like they can win at anything at anytime?

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