Sport And Children’s Emotions
Sport plays an important role in children’s emotions. In fact, they have a huge impact on the performance of children at all levels; also in their perception of sports participation.
When children lose their calm and concentration due to their emotions, their anxiety increases. Learning to manage emotions is as important to your child’s success as mastering the sport itself.
Sport and children’s emotions
Negative emotions
There is no doubt that negative emotions are present in sports in general and in children’s sports in particular. Children are often frustrated when they cannot develop a skill or when they are not able to learn a new technique as quickly as they would like.
Also, it is common for guys to get angry and disappointed when they lose. No one likes to lose. The problem is to consider this a failure, something quite common among children, especially when they accumulate many defeats.
It is also common for them to experience fear if they perceive physical risks in sport. This is very important when they see a lot of injuries around them or feel threatened by other players who do not play fair.
Replace negative emotions with positive ones in sport
For children to be able to generate positive emotions in sport, they must be given a hand so that they are able to see that it is possible to replace negative emotions and use them as tools of motivation, persistence and resilience.
Pride in a job well done or effort, as well as satisfaction in having reached the end of a competition will help boys to improve their perception of the sport. It will also help make your participation more enjoyable.
To promote this point of view, it is important that parents and coaches do not focus on the end result or the final achievement of skills. For this to work, you must value continuous improvement, fair play, camaraderie and interest.
Also, it is important not to ignore children’s concerns, not to underestimate their negative emotions. You have to listen to them and help them see the good that has happened, as well as help them to see from a different perspective what distresses them.
Help children master emotions
The emotions that children experience in sport can be very intense. But, whether they are negative or positive, it is important to help children to master those emotions that sport produces.
This is because kids may have seen adult athletes react in extreme ways, both in cases of success and failure. This is especially cumbersome in the case of professional athletes. Children assume that these extreme manifestations are the way they have to react. But this can lead to many problems, both personal and social.
In addition, in sports sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. Not controlling impulses can cause children to sit on a Ferris wheel that will not bring them any good in the future. In fact, for boys to learn to master the emotions derived from sport will be very useful for them in their adult lives, not only in terms of sports practice, but also in other areas.
Strategies to help children control their emotions
Jim Taylor, a specialist in sports psychology and parenting, and a professor at the University of San Francisco, proposes the following strategies for parents to help their children master their emotions are the following:
- Know the emotional baggage of the child. If a minor usually feels frustrated, angry or scared, the easiest thing is that the same thing happens to him in sports practice.
- Be a healthy role model. The best way to teach a child to react to emotions is to be a role model. Therefore, parents must demonstrate, through their actions, the way they consider appropriate to handle emotions.
- Allow the children to feel all the emotions. Many parents try to protect their children so that they do not have negative emotions and do not feel bad. But if they do not experience these types of emotions they will never learn to handle them.
- Participate in emotional training. This means guiding children when they are upset to recognize how they feel and to recognize childhood emotions in sport.
- Acknowledge emotions sincerely and honestly. Parents must fully acknowledge their children’s emotions and not devalue or underestimate them.
Finally, it is important to consider that many of the frustrations that children feel with sports are due to the fact that they feel that they have let their parents and coaches down. Therefore, it is very important to make the little ones see that this is not the case (even if it is). And is that many parents are projected onto their children, so it must be remembered that this is the experience of the child, not of their parents.
