The Role of the Sports Parent

As a sports parent you play an important role. How your child receives coaches and coaching is a parenting responsibility that can define how well you child adjusts to sports routines. The parental role in this maturing process can provide your child the competitive edge.
If you are like most sports parents, you think of life in the context of winning and losing. Your interpretations of sport are likely no different. There are constructive ways you can go about teaching your child about winning and losing and it is important to forgo win-at-all-cost attitudes and to be mindful of the small wins. Within the small wins there is an accountability factor and each of these two things plays a part in developing your child's "coachability."

Small Wins
Endless opportunities exist to find relationships between sports, life, winning and losing. Developing a child's understanding for what winning begins by opening familiar doors in their everyday life that introduce coaching.

When you open the door, what this does is provides you the opportunity to practice your coaching skills. In parenting, you are the leader and what you say goes. As a coach your role makes a subtle change from leader to teacher. As a teacher, how you say something does make a difference in your child's understanding. When you spend time educating your child and building your own coaching skills these healthy life skills that do make a difference and can be fun to practice together. Teaching is one of the best ways for a child to retain information. Going the extra step and having a child explain the steps to a simple process can be a rewarding experience on many levels.

Simple Coaching Opportunities:
Tying shoes
Zippering a jacket
Carrying in the groceries from the car
Buckling a safety belt
Washing the car
Drying the dishes

All of the above are examples of coaching opportunities. Each has simple step-by-step processes that allow you to break down instruction and explain it in its simplest terms. As simple as these coaching suggestions are, no matter how good you are at something, and this goes for anything you do well, you haven't truly mastered it until you can effectively teach it to another.

When you teach your child something new consider the small win possibilities inside each step. When a step is completed reward your child. Give he or she praise. This is what continues to inspire them and it creates a desire for them to want more of your coaching.

When each step is done and a task is complete celebrate the big win. When small wins are celebrated inside the big wins they make the big wins become more fruitful. Unfortunately, in our busy lives we cut corners and often the small wins are reduced out of the process. When this happens, big wins are not entirely shared with children. Children enjoy Mommy or Daddy's enthusiasm as a result of the big win but they don't always understand the process that was behind it because the small wins did not get celebrated.

Break it down
When you coach your child, remember to break processes down into three or four easy steps. This increases their ability to understand, it creates small win possibilities, helps you practice your coaching techniques. Patience, patience, patience is a necessary virtue of coaching. When you get tired think about mastering what you are teaching. Unless you find yourself somewhere in the process, it is safe to say you do not have the right intentions and it is likely you are missing the boat in your coaching efforts.

Coaching for small wins is one component in the maturing process of a young athlete and it is a building block for being coachable. The sacrifices you make to build small win opportunities teaches your child many great life lessons. You can assist them to become good communicators; be independent thinkers; patient, considerate of others and understanding of the differences between the small and the large wins. These are good lessons that open the door to accountability.

Accountability
As I have already eluded to, you create greater maturity in your child when you coach them. Consider the accountability you have taken for your child's development.

They learn how to take instruction;
They are forced to use their critical thinking skills;
They learn how to receive criticism;
They learn how to interact and communicate when they are confronted with a challenge; and
They learn what improvement is especially if each small win in the process is celebrated.

All of these lessons are characteristics within elite athletes. It is only when you establish instructional processes through coaching opportunities that you can create reasonable ways to hold your child accountable for what they learn. If children don't know better because you haven't taken the time than it is your accountability issue. When the coaching process is working effectively you are giving your child the competitive edge because you are preparing them to receive coaching and be coachable.