If you are a sports-parent, have you ever stopped to think about the goals you want your child to reach while competing in sports? For kids, most sport psychology surveys reveal they simply “want to have fun,” but for parents the goals often go beyond just having a good time. While a future full-ride college athletic scholarship might be a long-shot for most kids, there are countless very important and reachable skills and experiences your child can benefit from in youth and interscholastic sports, including:
- Athletic Transferable Skills. There are many very important life skills that can be learned in sports and applied to school, future careers, and every aspect of life. Some of these skills include setting and achieving goals, working with teammates, galvanizing resiliency, developing multi-tasking skills, using conflict resolution, and learning about leadership and role modeling. If you stop to think about it, sports provide the perfect forum to learn and master hundreds, if not thousands of skills, and all of these skills help with self-confidence and self-esteem, mood state, and even anxiety reduction.
- Growth & development. Sports can provide a terrific way for kids to learn about the importance of healthy nutrition and physical training habits. Whether it’s stretching, working out with weights, or learning how to eat a healthy diet, the experiences kids have in sports can help prepare for healthy future adult decisions later in life.
- Integrity. In sports, just like in life, there are countless ways to bend the rules (or even downright cheat). For young athletes, decisions around sports equipment and training regimes can sometimes border on integrity and making the right choice. Again, learning how to play with integrity and within the rules is a great primer for life.
- Social interactions. In sports, kids are placed on teams with other kids — and sometimes with kids that they don’t always get along with or like. Still, for team success to occur kids must learn to find commonalities amongst one another so that stronger team cohesion can develop. Team-building is not something unique to sports, as kids will eventually be placed on school academic teams, as well as work teams in their eventual careers.
- Handling success and dealing with failure. Winning with humility and respect for the opponent as well as losing with positive, healthy sportsmanship are invaluable skills kids can learn through sports. Learning how to win and lose the right way can build character and lead to bigger goals and accomplishments later in life.
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