Your
child stands
on the table and jumps: “Daddy I am flying”. You carry your child and follow their
narrative; you carry them just like superman would fly, and move around feeding
their narrative that he can fly and make him happy, developing all sorts of
cognitive, emotional, and physical abilities.
اضافة اعلان
You take your child to play sports. They kick the
ball and you start feeding your narrative now, not your child’s; this is how
you should shoot, pass, dribble, etc. This is when your child starts carrying
so you can be happy, while your child’s cognitive,
emotional, and physical abilities are deteriorating.
It is essential that parents be parents to their
children, and not coaches. Children need parents for guidance in life, for
emotional development, for support; creating a coach-like relationship changes
the lens through which children see their parents, and makes it difficult for
parents to see through their child’s lens and “feed their narrative” for
cognitive, emotional, and physical abilities to develop.
Research was made on the effect of parent-coach and
child-athlete
relationship. How an athlete feels about their sports experience
goes a long way toward making them decide whether they will continue to
participate, as well as other more serious decisions, with some research
linking athletic participation to increased substance abuse and risky behavior
(Bartko & Eccles 2003; Baumert et al., 1998).
Whereas positive
parental involvement has been
linked to outcomes such as greater enjoyment and self-esteem among players
(Ommundsen & Vaglum, 1991), parental over-involvement may lessen these
outcomes. Stein, Raedeke, and Glenn (1999) demonstrated that an optimal level
of parental emotional involvement may exist. The threshold may lie at the point
where parents, most often the father, become emotionally involved to a high
degree and start to make decisions on their child’s behalf. The parent shifts
to the roles of coach, manager, and agent, rather than an unconditionally
supportive family member (Coakley, 2006).
Negative or over-controlling behavior by
parents and
coaches is linked to a less positive sports experience for participants. Both
parent-coaches and child-athletes identified pressure on child-athletes as a
significant negative aspect of their relationship. Both child-athletes and
parent-coaches recognized that increased pressure also came indirectly from the
role of being the coach’s child. Both parent-coaches and child-athletes
specified several positive aspects of their relationship; the opportunity to
spend time with each another, especially in the sports context, was identified
as a positive by both groups.
Both parent-coaches and child-athletes raised the
topic of high expectations. Most child-athletes felt that their parent-coach
had higher expectations for them, in terms of either effort/performance or their
behavior at practices and games. Most parent-coaches stated that they had
higher expectations for their children, in terms of behavior, performance or
effort.
Children see
players through their own lenses. Hence, they start “doing” what they feel will
make them become their idol: buy the idol’s shirt, learn their skills, do their
celebrations, get their haircut, and wear the same shoes. When they play, they
see themselves as their idol. At first, it might seem like it is going in the
right direction, until at one point, reality kicks in, and the child becomes a
teenager or an adult and needs to perform in a specific way that helps the team
and works well with their overall ability (physical, technical, tactical and
mental).
Everyone has their own narrative, or lens through
which they sees and interprets events. Individuals’ experiences, not only in
sports, create beliefs that influence their behavior, their game. This
narrative determines their judgment of practice goals and objectives, and
influences how they judge their games and how they measure how things are
going.
Happy players are
healthy individuals, and feeding
into our children’s narrative helps more in their long-term development than
feeding into our narrative, as parents.
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