FEATURE
I CAN TELL YOU’R.E WORKING HARD
P
retty much the day your kid was born you starting dreaming big. You noticed how his hand-eye coordination seemed a little more advanced than the other babies his age. When you put that mini hockey stick in his toddler hand, his grip was almost perfect. Clearly he was meant for the big leagues. So, how do you nurture a future pro athlete? You make him practise in the backyard, you cheer louder than anyone else in the stands, and you dissect every detail of the play on the way home as if reviewing game tape—or so many moms and dads think. But what if we told you that the way many well-intentioned parents cheer on their kids in sports can actually undermine their love for it — and burn them out early?
NICE TRY!
BY SHAWNA COHEN
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NOVEMBER 2014 todaysparent.com
HOCKEY PLAYER: ISTOCK
WHAT YOU SAY (OR DON’T SAY) TO KID ATHLETES CAN MAKE ALL THE DIFFERENCE.
ICE RINK PHOTO: STOCKSY HOCKEY PLAYER, ICE TEXTURE: ISTOCK
GET THE &* $#ING PUCK !
IN THE WORLD OF SPORTS PARENTING, there’s a fine line between supporting and smothering. Nudging your couch potato kid to pick a sport is a good thing. Insisting he run on the treadmill four times a week to train for game day, sprinting onto the soccer field mid-match, hissing at the opposing team? Not so much. “Make no mistake: All of the drama goes on in the stands,” says mom-of-three Marie Sharpton*. Her boys—ages 10, eight and six—play hockey (one at select level), and she has seen many misbehaving parents at the rink. In her eldest son’s league, there’s one mom who constantly screams at her kid while he’s on the ice. “She’ll shriek, ‘Hurry up, Thomas!’ or ‘Wrong way, Thomas!’ One time he stopped mid-play and yelled ‘Shut up!’ into the stands. It was fantastic.” Sharpton’s middle son was once put in goal during the playoffs and no one—neither she, nor her child—knew just how good he was in that position. “He stopped a ton of shots,” she recalls. “One dad ran up to the box mid-game and demanded to see his birth certificate—they thought he was a ringer! He said, ‘Nobody can stop my son, and this kid is like a brick wall. They must have brought him in from somewhere, I don’t believe that he’s seven.’ He was yelling and screaming at the ref, mostly in disbelief.” Chris Duchene, mom of NHLer Matt Duchene, a centreman for the Colorado
Avalanche and Team Canada gold medal winner at the 2014 Winter Olympics, has witnessed all kinds of hockey parents. Matt’s schedule as a young player was rigorous— driving two hours each way from their home in Haliburton, Ont., to his AAA games, getting home at 1 a.m., and doing it over again the next day—but through it all, she and husband, Vince, always followed their son’s lead, she says. “If your kid’s equipment isn’t packed and by the door, if he hasn’t done his homework or is making excuses, then you need to seriously look at what he’s trying to tell you.” “The first question to ask yourself is, ‘What’s my motivation for my child’s sports participation?’” says Jim Taylor, a San Francisco–based psychologist and author of Positive Pushing: How to Raise a Successful and Happy Child. “Is it so he’ll make the NHL? Statistically speaking, it’s highly unlikely—the chances that a varsity high school athlete will go pro are six in a million,” he says. “Or is it for fun, health, life skills and camaraderie? Those are clearly the good ones.” Taylor recommends focusing on process rather than the outcome. “Kids don’t need to be told they’ve had a good result—it’s self-evident. If you want them to repeat that behaviour, identify what skills enabled them to do that. For instance, instead of saying, ‘All right! You had the winning goal,’ try, ‘You were really focused when you took that shot.’”
NOVEMBER 2014 todaysparent.com
5 RULES OF GOOD SPORTS PARENTING 1. EMPOWER THEM Child psychologist and motivational coach Joe Flanders says it’s totally within bounds to expect your kid to participate in sports—but let her choose which one. “For a reluctant child, tell her, ‘Let’s give it a shot and see what happens.’ Approach it as an exploration, a curiosity.” 2. FOCUS ON THE EXPERIENCE Rather than discussing outcomes (which team won, who scored), Flanders suggests asking your sport kid questions like, “How did it feel to move so fast? Did you have fun?” 3. NEVER TALK ABOUT ABILITY “Telling your kids, ‘You’re so talented, you’re gifted’ is a bad idea,” says Jim Taylor, a San Francisco–based psychologist and author. “Research shows that when parents compliment kids about ability, they lose motivation and aren’t able to recover from failure.” Instead, focus on effort which is not always reflected in the final score. 4. LAY OFF THE 20 QUESTIONS Post-game, we’re all tempted to recap, going over the finer details of every play, but as Flanders puts it, “Don’t put pressure on your kid to come up with a news brief on what the experience was like. It should be fluid and natural,” he says. “Ask open-ended questions without an agenda in mind.” 5. GO FOR PIZZA When doubles tennis players and Olympic gold medallists Bob and Mike Bryan would come off the court, Taylor says, their dad, Wayne, would simply ask them, “Where do you want to eat?” As Taylor explains, “Do you say ‘Good job?’ Well, it may not have been a good job. When Wayne asks where they want to eat, he’s showing that results are not important.”
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