We are sharing this great article from Active Kids
1: Keep It Fun
If we know anything about children and sports, we know that children follow the fun. When the fun stops, kids quit playing. Come to think of it, don't coaches follow the fun as well?
2: Discover the Sports Goals of Your Child
What do you hope your child will achieve by participating in sports? Make a list of your sports dreams for your child. Now go over that list and ask yourself, "How will my presence as a coach impact these dreams?" Be honest. Be specific. If you remain convinced you are the best coach for your child, go ahead. If not, coach another team.
3: Use Your Experience with Other Coaches
Take time to recall the coaches you admired. What made these coaches special in your eyes? Make a list of the qualities and traits of coaches who were positive influences in your life. Try to emulate those coaches.
4: Examine Your Motives for Coaching Your Child
Be sensitive to your child's level of sports ambition as compared to your own. Are you projecting your dreams, your level of ambition, onto your child? If you want success more than your child, your relationship is at risk. Your relationship with your son or daughter will suffer if you press your child too hard.
5: Times Have Changed
Remember that your sports dreams and ambitions are a product of your childhood. Your own child is being raised by different people, at a different point in time and with a different set of games than you were. Be sensitive to generation-gap issues.
6: Respect Your Child's Individuality
Your child is an individual first, and an athlete second. To ensure a positive experience from sports, you must respect your child's individuality.
7: Listen More Than You Lecture
Encourage your child to communicate openly with you. When you coach your child in team sports, other players may become jealous. They may express jealousy by rejecting or ignoring your child socially. Teammates may criticize you to your child. Your child needs to feel free to talk about his or her feelings. Your child needs to know you will listen to issues such as these.
8: Treat Your Child Equal to Other Players
Never be harder on your own child than you are on the other players. Some coaches try too hard to prove their objectivity. They push their own child more than the other members of the team. This is bad for your child's self-esteem and destructive to the parent-child relationship.
9: Be Aware of Limitations
Know when to say when. When your temperament or knowledge limits are met, it is time to move your child to a more appropriate coach. Do it graciously. Be supportive, give the new coach a fair opportunity.
10: Be Positive, Criticize Constructively
Instructional comments will be more effective than emotional attacks. Studies have conclusively demonstrated that instructional feedback builds self-esteem, produces superior performance and more motivated athletes.
11: Learn How to Cool Your Temper When Angry
If your anger is related to your bad mood, dumping your anger on your child will create problems for two people instead of one. If the error is significant, it will be there tomorrow. Correct the error when you have cooled down. Remember, if he or she could have done better, they would have done better!
12: Use Assistants
Your child may be more open to feedback from assistants, especially once puberty hits. At puberty, and sometimes before, children have a strong drive to assert their independence. Sometimes advice is easier to take when it comes from outside the family.
13: Use Team Meetings
Ask players for their input, and perhaps even get a suggestion box for players and parents to provide suggestions about how best to achieve team goals. A suggestion box or similar system may help defuse perceptions of favoritism and build consensus.
14: Children Need to Experience a Sense of Mastery
Success is important. Win-loss record is important. Why? Because children talk to other children. By third grade they will be asked how their team is doing. By middle school your children will be teased for poor performance.
15: Keep Sports in Perspective
Balance between sport and life will reduce performance anxiety for the athlete. Balance includes doing chores and school work and maybe even scouts or church as well as sports.
Have some parental coaching tips? email urbansoccerstore@gmail.com to share!
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