When it comes to sports parenting, one of the toughest challenges is finding the right sport training that matches your child’s interest, goals, and abilities. Placing your child in a super-easy sports league may lead to boredom, yet having your child train in a league that is far too intense often leads to mental health challenges including anger, frustration, and premature quitting. So how do you get it right? One consideration that may help guide the process is to examine the theory of Flow (colloquially known as “the zone” by athletes), and the conditions that should be met in order for one to enjoy Flow.
Understanding Flow
Ask any athlete about their best day and very often you will hear about how they played “in the zone,” but what does that mean? Psychologists often refer to the zone as being in Flow, defined as a mental state in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in the activity, energized, focused, and intrinsically enjoying the activity. Often when one experiences Flow they feel completely absorbed in what they are doing, lose their sense of time, and feel that their efforts are natural and effortless. As you might imagine, being in Flow is the ideal mental health state for many life activities, not just sports!
Additional characteristics psychologists have learned about Flow include a feeling of being challenged, understanding specific goals of the activity, and regularly receiving feedback while doing the activity. As you might imagine, life activities that are not challenging do not help us experience Flow, and neither do activities that are incredibly difficult to where we feel little chance that we can succeed.
Applying Flow to youth sports and we are posed with arguably one of the most important questions sport parents face: How do we place our child in sport leagues that best allow him or her to experience Flow, and thereby fully enjoy the sport and learn how to play his or her best?
While there is no simple answer to that question, there are discussions families can have to lead to the best chance of finding sport-specific opportunities that best match your child:
- What is my child’s, not my own, interest in this sport? While it is nice when parents like a sport as much or more than their child, the main thing is to regularly talk to your child about how he or she likes a particular sport, then revisit that conversation from time-to-time to see if things change. If your child tells you directly that he or she does not enjoy the sport, placing your child in an intense sport league will likely only lead to bigger problems.
- Is this league far too easy? If your child does enjoy a specific sport, it is important to try as best you can to steer away from leagues that are well below his or her physical abilities. Yes, it’s nice to see your child dominate the competition, but in most cases where a kid is far better than anyone else on the field the child ends up feeling bored, his focus becomes too wide, and there is a greater risk for injury because of disinterest and few challenges. Few kids who compete in these kinds of environments experience Flow, another important factor if ongoing sport improvement is the goal.
- Is this league way too intense? Similar to placing your child in a sports league that is too easy, signing your kid up for a super-difficult league presents its own set of potential problems. Kids who lose their confidence early in life often struggle rebuilding their confidence, and it is near impossible to experience Flow when you feel you have little to no chance at success.
- What are our future goals with this sport, and how does this experience help/hurt toward those goals? It may be surprising to learn that many parents never have this conversation, and instead simply play it by ear with respect to guiding their kids through sports. Comparatively, a better way to go is to learn about the sports your kids enjoy, understand the realities of playing the sport(s) beyond high school, then decide how much effort will go toward sports long-term. How you answer this question should provide many of the answers pertaining to how much time, energy, and money you may want to dedicate toward sports, as well as the types of leagues that best match your goals.
Final thoughts
There are many options for kids when it comes to sports training these days, but parents need to be actively involved in the decision-making process and not simply go through random leagues without taking their child’s unique interests and abilities into account. Ideally, sport training opportunities should be centered around your child’s intrinsic interests and motivations, similar competition, and leagues that value fun and growth as much as they do competition. Remember, both going too hard or too easy have potential negative consequences, making this an important topic of discussion for sports-minded families.
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