Welcome to this week’s Mental Health Blog, where we’ll explore a crucial aspect of youth sport: the parent’s role on the sidelines. Our goal is to highlight how your involvement can foster a truly positive environment for growth, regardless of the scoreline.
Parents are a vital part of youth sport, significantly influencing their children’s experiences and development. While your dedication and support are incredibly valuable, studies show that parental verbal behaviour can have a profound impact, sometimes in unintended ways. Our focus is on understanding this impact to help optimise your involvement.
Cultivating a Positive Sideline Environment:
• Be a Source of Encouragement and Positivity: Youth athletes thrive on encouragement and supportive comments. Even non-verbal cues should align with your supportive words. Many young footballers claimed to enjoy parental praise and encouragement, finding it makes them feel ‘good,’ ‘confident,’ and ‘proud’.
• Avoid Negative Comments and Overbearing Behaviour: While passion is understandable, approximately 13-15% of comments in youth sport are negative, and in some settings, this can be as high as 30-40%. Criticism, swearing, and abuse can inhibit player development and thwart early involvement.
• Mind Your Timing and Content: Even well-intentioned advice can be a major source of distress and confusion for young athletes if it conflicts with the coach’s instructions. Youth appear to experience parental verbal behaviour in polarising ways. Research suggests that debriefing with children after competition about performance can unwittingly upset them and exacerbate negative feelings. Athletes prefer parents to allow the team time to process game outcomes before debriefing, and to provide positive comments to all team members, not just their own child.
• Manage Your Emotions: Parents can experience many demands and stressors, particularly leading up to, during, and after competitions. If these negative emotions are not managed appropriately, it can result in anti-social behaviour, increasing children’s perceptions of pressure, and detrimentally affecting the relationship that parents and children have with their coach. Children want their parents to control their emotions.
• Focus on Holistic Development: Beyond football skills, youth sport is a powerful context for developing psychosocial skills and life skills that transfer to other areas of life, such as an enhanced work ethic, learning to overcome adversity, developing leadership skills, and embracing teamwork. Parents can help their children build character and become stronger within themselves. Your support in this broader development is invaluable.
Our aim is not to ‘fix’ parents. Instead, we want to help you become an even greater strength in your child’s journey in sport. Understanding the social meaning of parental verbal behaviour is crucial, as some verbal behaviours, like sarcastic remarks towards officials or criticism of players, can become commonplace or “normal” among parents through social interaction. However, these normalised comments might not be what the young athletes themselves want or find helpful
We encourage you to reflect on your sideline behaviour and how it contributes to the overall environment. Your positive, supportive presence is key to helping your child enjoy their sport and reach their full potential, both on and off the pitch.