PARENTS: HOW TO GET IT RIGHT
As a parent, you clearly have the potential to have a significant impact on your child’s development and their life as an athlete, whether they have big ambitions or not. You probably have a strong urge to control your athlete to make sure they are doing everything right, in your mind, to give them every bit of help and every chance to succeed. I’m sure you get frustrated when your athlete repeats obvious mistakes, giving you cause to take control or nag. When sport requires you to invest much of your time and money, it becomes all too easy for you as a parent to get too involved and forget what sport is all about. When this happens, your behaviour and language can increase your child’s stress and can lead to them resenting you, being fearful of failure and falling out of love with sport. Don’t be this parent.
Of course, there are stories of extraordinary athletes who have been raised by a strict parent, or parents, holding their child to a stringent regime and raising them with the sole purpose of them becoming an exceptional athlete, most notably Tiger Woods in golf and the Williams sisters, Venus and Serena, in tennis. There are always going to be exceptions. Their success does not mean the way they are supposed to have been raised was
