All parents want the best for their children. Parents typically do everything in their power to ensure their children's health, happiness, physical and emotional well-being. In addition to providing the basics, parents offer encouragement and unconditional support (including procuring support from third parties, such as tutors, counselors, and consultants) to help their kids accomplish their goals and succeed in life.
When their children display athletic ability, parents must navigate another area, often foreign to them--encouraging and developing that ability. They have to help their children learn to balance practices and competition with school and other aspects of their lives. Parents and children have to learn to deal with coaches, opponents, and teammates and their families. And these days support now can include facilitating participation on more developmental teams and entail sending their aspiring athletes to clinics or camps, or even hiring specialty coaches to develop budding skills. Many parents take this in stride and successfully transfer their positive and supportive parenting skills to youth athletics.
But for some parents, the athletic arena becomes a danger zone.
Some parents become highly invested in their children's athletic endeavors, even living vicariously through them. They may end up putting undue pressure on their children, and even their coaches and teammates. This may impede their children's athletic progress. While it's certainly appropriate to confer with coaches about their children's athletic progress (similar to a parent-teacher conference) and object to
trulyincompetent or abusive coaches whocross the line of acceptable behavior, warranting afeatured spot on Spike TV's
Coaching Bad, there's another side of the coin: Parents who routinely complain to coaches about their children's playing time or perceived unequal treatment, tell coaches how to do their jobs (i.e.: weigh in on coaching techniques, content, game strategy, etc.), move their children from team to team to "shop" for coaches who will promote their children, misbehave in the stands or on the pool deck, and even foment dissention among their children's teammates and other team families. Such extreme, outrageous parental behavior clearly crosses "he line and can hurt their children in ways they likely can't imagine. Similarly, if children decide they don't want to continue in sports favored by their parents (or any sport at all), some parents try to force their children to continue, which also may backfire in unforeseen ways.
The Positive Coaching Alliance (
http://www.usawaterpolo.org/resources/pca.html) is an outstanding resource offering excellent guidelines and suggestions for parents as they help their aspiring athletes pursue their goals, whether at a recreational, developmental, collegiate or professional level. Combining positive parenting skills espoused by the PCA with common sense will enable parents to truly do what's best for their children in a manner that may enhance their collegiate athletic recruiting prospects. And if children signal that they don't want to compete at the collegiate level, positive parenting dictates the parent accept their children's choices and support their decision to pursue different sports or other non-athletic endeavors.
Next issue: Can Parents Undermine Recruiting Prospects?
Questions? Write to Angela Kraus at angela@shootingforcollege.info. Angela is an experienced and certified college counselor providing comprehensive college counseling services to help students prepare and ensure eligibility for graduation from high school and admission to college. A special focus of her practice is advising high school athletes as they pursue the athletic recruiting process, with emphasis on water polo players.
