Your Kid (Probably) Needs a Check-In
Do you REALLY know how your kid feels about their life as an athlete?
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May is Mental Health Awareness Month. It’s also crunch time for spring sports, tryouts for fall sports, and the sheer madness of end of school activities, including important tests for some of the older kids. Holy crap, I’m stressed out just typing about it!
Not going to get too deep today though I do have some specific mental health and youth sports content planned in the coming weeks. But wanted to send out a friendly reminder that playing sports is a massive easel for mental health issues to manifest through overt behavior. This can be seen through performance anxiety, bad body language, or the inverse, an athlete who is uncharacteristically withdrawn. And maybe what we deem an underlying mental health issue is really just an underlying desire not to be playing a certain sport.
Sorry if I sound preachy today but if I’ve learned one thing from experts I’ve chatted with and from hearing your anecdotes, it’s that we are our kids’ maestros. Our nerves become their nerves, our trash-talking becomes their trash-talking. Believe me, I’ve learned this the hard way.
There’s no specific one-size-fits-all method to mastering this youth sports parent gig, but the one thing we can all do is check in with our kiddos. Never assume they are ok. Be a sounding board. Let them lead the conversation. Don’t pepper them with follow-ups.
For some of you newer Good Game subscribers, I highly recommend asking your kid to fill our simple “My Life as an Athlete” questionnaire. My kids filled it out and a couple of their responses caught be by surprise. 6) When I’m playing, I like my parents to be less loud than the other parents was not one of them.
In any event, here’s the full questionnaire.
And here it is in printable form.
So however you best check in with your kids, there’s no better time to do so. And if you have any tips for the rest of us, please share because this youth sports parenting thing is HARD.
It's hard though, because parents make it hard. Where I live, the parents take a hands-off approach, even in high school. Maybe that's part of the culture, but I think Eric Wynalda is right; we need to let kids be kids and let the experts drive the experience--not the other way around.
The term 'maestros' is spot on. It makes me think of another article I read that parenting has shifted over the years from allowing kids to learn/grow with some curbs and guidelines to parents treating each child like an 18 year science project and wanting to engineer every aspect of their life.
My approach to youth sports was to always make it crystal clear it was their activity. I'd be there to support in a way they liked. I remember my son walking off the soccer field talking to the other wing and asking which side he preferred and the kid said 'the side without the parents.'
Our rules were easy. We were only positive from the stands to the players, refs or coaches. I never talked about the game or practice on the ride home unless he brought it up and only what he wanted to talk about. I asked him every year if he still wanted to play and made it clear it was his decision...I never wanted him to feel obligated to play because he thought we wanted him to. Kids are perceptive, they see when parents wrap a lot of their family life/activity/resources into their sport and worry about letting them down if they decide to do something else.