Monday, November 12, 2012

 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

How NOT to be a Helicopter Parent: 3 Keys to Raising Today's Athlete

by Dr. Leif H Smith

In today's fast-paced, high-stress society, we are under more pressure than ever to succeed, particularly with regards to athletic achievement, and at earlier age than ever before. While I believe that competition is a good thing, I also believe that too much competition leads to anxiety and needless tension.

As parents, we are exemplars for our children, teaching them how to handle themselves and modeling for them how to best handle the ups and downs of competitive life. Too many parents, however, fail to realize how powerful a role they play in the developmental life of their young athletes. They confuse their own dreams with their children's dreams, and they believe that they can assist their children in anticipating and avoiding the inevitable obstacles that face all athletes. Over time, they become more and more obsessed with their children's athletic achievements, and attempt to utilize all the resources at their disposal to ensure success athletically. On occasion, their children do well. However, they fail to realize that their children didn't succeed BECAUSE of them. They succeeded DESPITE them.

This is the definition of a helicopter parent. Helicopter parents are easily identifiable: They cheer too loud, for too long, take failures personally and are slow to recover, are obsessed with perfection, and promote imbalance in their children's lives, whereby social development is neglected in favor of athletic achievement.

What follows are three easy tips that any parent can follow to ensure that they do not become overly involved in their young athlete's life in a detrimental manner.

1. Get perspective

As a parent, you need to keep perspective. You need to understand that your children may be a product of your genes, but they are also individuals with their own lives to live. Healthy parenting perspective also means understanding that sports are not life, but rather, one small part of life. They allow us to learn powerful lessons that we can apply later in life (work ethic, how to lose with grace, how to set goals, etc.), but they also teach irrationality (life is about either winning or losing). As parents, we need to have perspective. Very few athletes make it to the highest echelons in their respective sports. All athletes, however, can learn the important lessons that sport teaches, and can do it in a way that is both fun and healthy.

2. Teach your child to be responsible for their own choices

One of the great lessons in life that we need to learn to be successful in anything, much less sports, is that we are ultimately responsible for making our own choices in any given moment. As parents, we sometimes forget this, and try to make decisions for our children, thinking we know what is best for them. However, what happens is that, by making the decisions for our children, we forestall their ability to understand the connection between choice and consequence. This is a crucial life lesson, and when our children aren't allowed the developmental space to learn that hard work pays dividends, or that there are lessons to be learned that accompany any loss, they fail to internalize important aspects of normal social development.

3. Prioritize fun over achievement

Sports should be fun, and we as parents tend to lose sight of this. Our vision becomes clouded by immediate successes, especially when our children are achieving at levels that we never attained ourselves. Therefore, it's important to actively prioritize having fun while competing as a central part of athletic participation. Young athletes that don't have fun experience more burnout and psychological disturbance (in my opinion and work experience) while participating in sport than do their counterparts that participate for intrinsic reasons.