Dr. Larry Lauer of the Institute for the Study of Youth Sports was cited on January 21 in an article posted on Canada’s Huffington Post news site. The article focuses on how to coach your child in sport.
Parents Coaching Sports – Huffington Post Canada
ISYS has been a leader in sport parent research and the dissemination of educational materials to help parents. ISYS has developed sport parent education programming for the United States Tennis Association, National Federation of High Schools, the Parent Mental Trainer for Mental Training, Inc., and the Michigan High School Athletic Association. Drs. Lauer, Dan Gould, and Marty Ewing have spoken to thousands of parents over the years about effectively playing their important role in youth and high school sport.
Coaching your own child may be one of the most difficult things a parent can do, and yet the American system leans heavily on the parent volunteer coach. Therefore, ISYS and Dr. Lauer provide parents science-based advice on how best to coach their child.
The Huffington Post article provides guidelines basic guidelines for how handle the dual role of parent and coach or the wearing of “two hats”. Communicating to your child about the two roles and also reflecting often on how you are handling it are an important part of managing the dual role. Yet, there are many issues with the parent-coach dual role that parents should understand.
Children often struggle to make the distinction between coach and parent, and are unable to remove the emotional ties. So, while the parent may feel comfortable in how she is separating her two roles, the child may still feel the confusion and stress. Issues that happen in practice will often carry on at home.
How the child thinks about and reacts to the parent-coach will certainly be guided by their age as well as the intensity of competition. Younger children will likely not be able to make any distinction between parent and coach, it will just be “dad”. Teenagers will be more adept at separating the roles, however, with emotional turbulence going on during those years parent-coaches often run in to many issues in their dual role.
Furthermore, more elite or competitive situations, especially as children grow older, will make the dual role more difficult to navigate as the pressures to perform and the push needed to develop the child’s talent escalate. Also, in a team sport environment other team parents will often be more intense and there may be more contention with the Mom as Coach. Often there is a feeling that the child of the coach receives preferential treatment in terms of starting positions and playing time even if it is not true.
These issues and more make the parent-coach dual role challenging. Well-informed and prepared parents should make sure to talk with their child about how the relationship will work. Further, the potential parent-coach should look at himself and the situation to determine if a parent-coach is appropriate and has a chance for success.
See our Parents page for more resources.