Sports Parents: Are Your Kids Reaping the Benefits From Sports?

What are the extra and all-important benefits of sports for kids? That’s a question Dr. Steve Horan, an expert in community health improvement, asked himself after many years of being a coach and sports parent.

 ”As you look at the numbers, so many kids drop out at age 13 and 14 for many different reasons,” he says. “So I began to ask myself, ‘What value can we deliver through youth sports above and beyond the value that is delivered to the excellent athlete?’”

 He realized that sports can help kids develop important traits and skills that transfer to other parts of life, he told us in a recent interview…

Through sports, young athletes can value wellness, learn how to hold onto their ethics in a competitive environment, develop good relationships with parents and coaches, become more self-directed, learn how to be team players, and learn how to be leaders, he says.

However, he says, young athletes don’t develop these social and emotional assets without some help from parents and coaches.

“Parents and coaches have to be very vigilant to ensure that sports have this desired goal of character development,” says the founder of sports parent.net.

Parents need to be good consumers, he says. They need to make the right decisions about coaching their own children and finding the right programs for their kids. The goal, he says, is helping kids become happy and productive adults.

Here at the The Ultimate Sports Parent and Kids’ Sports Psychology Kids’ Sports Psychology, we agree. We have loads of resources that address this issue.

First of all, in our Ultimate Sports Parent workbook, we tell you just how to choose the right coach.

Our workbook teaches parents to:

• Be sure to interview the coach.
• Ask about his or her philosophy.
• Ask him about how he or she handles playing time
• If you think he or she is a bad fit for your child, keep looking. If you can’t find a suitable coach, consider forming your own team.

But that’s not all, at Kids’ Sports Psychology, we also offer loads of tips for how to help ensure your kids reap all the social, emotional and mental game benefits of playing youth sports.

For example, at Kids’ Sports Psychology for sports parents of young athletes, we include videos, articles and ebooks about these topics:

• How to boost young athletes’ confidence
• How to help kids stop worrying about what others think of them
• How to help kids kick perfectionism (a trait that often leads to lowered self-confidence)
• How to help kids improve their motivation

You can learn these sports parenting skills and much more at our new website that helps you instill confidence and positive mental game skills in young athletes:

Boost Your Kids Confidence and Success in Sports-Sports Psychology for Children

Thanks,

Patrick Cohn & Lisa Cohn

p.s. At Kids Sports Psychology, you can also download our popular program, “Parents’ Top Dilemma” to help sports kids kick perfectionism and fear of failure. You can read more about the Kick Perfectionism Program here:

Kick Perfectionism in Young Athletes