The only way to know how your child feels is to ask.
This post focuses on healthy adult-child relationships within the context of youth sports, but the principles apply to most activities your child engages in—sports, school, music and theater programs, community activities, and more. It explores how we, as parents, can increase the likelihood that our children feel supported rather than pressured in their various activities.
At the Start
It is likely that initially, you encouraged your child to participate in sports (or other activity) with the best of intentions. You wanted them to get some exercise, make friends, and cultivate habits of excellence such as preparedness, responsiveness, teamwork, resilience, joy, humor, and humility. Maybe you were excited about sharing an activity you love with your child or about joining them in a world you knew very little about.
How It’s Going
But somewhere along the way we, as parents, often lose sight of our original intentions and get caught up in the sideline hype—other parents talking about stats, more elite teams, private trainers and scholarships, and coaches telling us our kid has “what it takes.” As I describe in my book Still Quiet Place for Athletes: Mindfulness Skills for Achieving Peak Performance and Finding Flow in Sports and in Life, this shifts our focus.
“The dilemma for all of us who want to support our children in their various endeavors is that often our perceptions about our motivations and our behaviors are profoundly different from our children’s experience of them. Put simply, what we intend as support is often experienced by our children as pressure. Research shows that such pressure negatively affects our children—causing performance anxiety, decreased enjoyment of the sport, sport burnout, and eventually sport dropout. More important, such pressure can increase the risk of physical injury, anxiety, and depression and ultimately can have lifelong negative effects on our relationships with our children and on their health and well-being.”
As you read the above, perhaps you were thinking that you are not one of those parents and this doesn’t apply to you. Or perhaps it was, “Uh oh, this might be me.” Or maybe it was, “I know I am pushing my kid, and it is for his own good. “
Listening
But it doesn’t really matter what you think. What matters is how your child feels. And the only way to know how your child feels is to ask.
If you truly want to support your child, I encourage you to ask your child the questions below, and listen to their response. Some of what your child says may be hard to hear. And the harder it is to hear, the more important it is that you breathe and listen.
Set the intention of hearing your child’s experience. Do your best to listen open-heartedly—without an agenda, without formulating your explanations, defenses, and justifications while your child is speaking.
To begin this conversation, you can say something along the lines of, “I really want to support you in whatever you do—sports, school, music, art, debate, robotics—whatever. And I am learning that there is a difference between support and pressure. So I want to check in and really understand what feels supportive to you.”
If you are a parent who has been told by a spouse, friend, teammate’s parent, coach, or teacher that you are a bit intense, you can add something like this: “If talking about this feels stressful, it is important for me to know that too. I would be happy to have you write down how you feel or choose someone you trust to help us have this conversation.”
- Question 1: What do I do or say that feels supportive to you?
- Question 2: What do I do or say that feels stressful to you?
- Question 3: What can I stop doing, or start doing, that would feel more supportive?
Now What?
Perhaps your child told you that they feel loved and supported. Or perhaps your child shared feedback that was hard for you to hear. If your child is feeling less than supported, take a deep breath, and remember your original intentions and that the odds of your child getting a college scholarship, going pro, or being accepted to Harvard or Juilliard are extremely low.
Then do your best to adjust your behavior based on your child’s suggestions–-attend more games, stop coaching from the sidelines, say three positive things after each competition.
Remember, learning new athletic, academic, musical, or parenting skills takes time and repetition. So be patient with yourself and persistent in your efforts to be truly supportive.
Article Posted to Psychology Today:
