The Sporting Life - Research Helps Families Adjust To An Increase In Youth
Athletics
Sisters Kari Ornes (left) and Julie Lundquist have worked with Nicole LaVoi's research into moms who coach. They buck the trend by coaching soccer for older kids at Prior Lake High School.
By Brigitt Martin
If you’ve got kids, chances are good you spent the summer scheduling vacations and family dinners around soccer games, youth baseball, or some other organized sports. In its 2008 survey, the National Council of Youth Sports (NCYS) found that approximately 44 million children participate in the sports offered by its member organizations— many in multiple sports—a significant increase over the past decade. They are supported by 7.4 million adults who coach, referee, manage teams, and the like. As more American families chart an exhausting course between practices, games, and team fundraisers, researchers in the college are asking: Are children and their families reaping the benefits?
And what happens when parents don the role of coaches? Where does home end and the playing field begin?
Maureen Weiss, a professor in the School of Kinesiology and co-director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport, sees a lot to be gained from participation in organized youth sports, with appropriate programming. “Sports can teach life skills, but it’s not automatic,” she notes. “We need caring, competent coaches and parents, and there needs to be some deliberate curriculum or lessons for life skills transfer.”
Weiss cites the example of a youth development program called The First Tee, in which golf is the context for promoting character, confidence, and self-regulation. She discovered that the positive development among young participants, including the ability to make choices and to manage negative emotions, followed the golfers into their school and family environments.
Ross Velure Roholt, an assistant professor in the School of Social Work who specializes in youth development, finds similar value in youth athletics. “Besides learning about teamwork, goal setting and attainment, and so on, we’re finding that kids involved in organized sports have greater civic engagement,” Roholt explains.
Parents on the playing field
Many of the adults who coach and manage youth sports are parents of participants—a dynamic that inevitably affects both family and team relationships.
“Sports can provide opportunities to build great relationships with parents and siblings,” says Weiss, who studied a group of father-coaches and their 11- and 12-year old son-athletes who played competitive soccer.
Both fathers and sons identified positive aspects of the coaching relationship, including quality time together and the ability to pass along special skills and values. However, there were drawbacks. The sons at times felt the pressure of higher expectations and more criticism for mistakes, along with other instances of unequal treatment. The coach-fathers, for their part, also identified issues with placing undue expectations on their sons and challenges with separating the role of father and coach.
Weiss concludes that parent-coaches are necessary to the survival of youth sports but cautions parents to preserve the precious parent-child relationship and not attempt to coach their children once they have advanced to the travel league level, which is highly competitive.
Fathers tend to be the primary coaches for girls’ teams, too. Nicole LaVoi, associate director of the Tucker Center, is researching obstacles to the involvement of more women as youth sports coaches. “Fewer women get to experience being parent-coaches,” she explains. “This can be attributed to a multitude of barriers, as women are still the majority of primary family caretakers and, if they also work outside the home, may see coaching as ‘the third shift.’ ”
Moms who do coach tend to do so with younger kids, stepping back around adolescence when few parents of either gender feel fit to coach at a high level, LaVoi adds. “There are few female parent-coaches for boys’ teams for similar reasons,” she continues. “The stereotype is that men are needed to teach boys to be men.”
However, having moms as coaches can be particularly beneficial for girls, says LaVoi, citing research that demonstrates girls identify more with same-sex role models. She says the girls may develop greater self-esteem and increased likeliness to coach in later years.
Staying sidelined
Even parents who don’t take an official role can have a large impact on their child’s feeling about sports. Pressure to win can detract from children’s experience of athletics, says William Doherty, a professor in the Department of Family Social Science. “If parents are overly invested in their children’s success, children will be doing it for the parent, not themselves.”
Symptoms of parental over-investment can include shouting at and arguing with coaches or officials, or even fighting in the stands. LaVoi, who has studied parent-spectator behavior, has found that incidents of anger occur more frequently at older kids’ team sporting events where the competition level is higher. She cautions that confrontations between parents or officials can be distressing to children of all ages but especially to younger ones.
In contrast to the angry parent as negative role model, Weiss says that parents who exhibit positive cues about their child’s physical competence and the value of physical activity are a positive influence: “Children need to see parents as physically active people who enjoy what they do. Go to the gym! Walk! And express your excitement about these activities.”
A healthy balance
When does the full calendar of practices and away games become too much—for both the child and the family? Doherty emphasizes the importance of balancing the child’s need to experience the sporting life with the needs of the family as a whole, and has started parent groups and Web sites committed to setting aside time for the family. While Doherty notes the absence of research on the effects of over-scheduling, he says anecdotally that over-scheduling can stress the family as a whole, diminish the quality of family life, and cause couples to sacrifice critical time for relationship-building.
The impact on the child is also not cut-and-dried. “You cannot determine if a child is over-scheduled by measuring the number of hours or activities,” Doherty says. “You see the stress and tension in the child. They lose a part of their childhood, especially in activities that are competitive.”
Over-scheduling isn’t a challenge for all U.S. children, however. In fact, it may be a product of privilege. “Many children are under-served, under-scheduled, and lack opportunities to participate,” LaVoi says, “including children in low socioeconomic status families, immigrant families, and ethnic minority families.”
Cuts to school budgets have hit some of these groups particularly hard, causing some schools to charge athletes to play at the high school level, Weiss points out. She also notes that, as the level of competition increases, players may be expected to provide more expensive equipment and fund travel and ice time, for example, which can limit participation to wealthier families.
For those parents who can and do over-schedule their children for fear of depriving them of an opportunity, Doherty sympathizes but points to the facts: “The strongest research about activities that are good for kids says family dinners are number one. Ultimately, scheduling activities that compete with family time and family meals replaces something great with something good.”