It sometimes takes considerable planning and time management to ensure parents are present at their children’s various sporting events. It is usually obvious from our kid’s attitudes that they expect you, not only arrange their transport to and from their sporting venues, but that you are there to watch and encourage them.
While this process can take up a major chunk of your time, it is important parents watch with interest how their children perform. There is no doubt parents will need to be attentative, to be involved in the after-the-event discussions.
Our children’s involvement in sports is a healthy exercise for them and needs to be encouraged. How, we as parents, provide that encouragement can be vital to the effectiveness of their participation.
The more recent concept of giving each competitor a reward for their involvement, in my opinion, takes away the need for children to strive to perform at their best. This, consequently reduces the value of the reward for the victors. Given the right encouragement, hopefully, those who fail to achieve an award will try to improve and thus gain more benefit, both mentally and physically from the exercise.
How we go about encouraging our children in improving their participation in the sport of their choice is of great importance. The first question we must ask ourselves is whether the choice of the particular sport was theirs or ours.
Sometimes, because we played a particular sport when we were younger, we assume our children will follow in our footsteps. This can often lead to outbursts of anger from the side lines if parents see in their children what they would deem as failed performances, based on their own adult standards.
This negative form of attack on our children is far from encouragement and could be said to cause the child considerable anxiety and mental stress. Positive suggestions and helpful encouraging advice will help our children aim to perform at their best while competing.
I’m Peter Mack and that’s life.
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