In
my roles as teacher, coach, and child and family therapist, I have had
many interactions with parents. But, one of my most remarkable
experiences with a parent came at the hands of one of my wisest friends.
I visited her several days after she had given birth to her first
child. After many of the expected pleasantries had been exchanged, she
said of her new child, “Well, she was inside of me and now she isn’t.
And I see my job as creating the conditions under which she can move
ever more safely and securely, step by step, further away from me.”
That was 12 years ago and I think I’m still in the process of
recovering from such an insightful and prescient comment from so new a
mother. I say this because it is exactly the opposite of every
inclination we must have when entrusted with a new life so utterly and
entirely dependent upon us. All aspects of this reality must move us to
hold on tighter, while the socioemotional and developmental truth
remains that in order for this new organism to truly thrive and
actualize, we must practice letting go again and again and again. This
reality is also true for sport parents. You want to micromanage every
aspect of your child’s sport experience, shield him or her from the
slings and arrows of an outrageous bounce/call/seeding, from the pain of
losing, that you grasp ever tighter to every aspect of the experience.
But, for your athlete to get the most adaptive growth out of the
experience, for them to truly become the athletes they need to be (and
this may entail not
becoming athletes), you must practice the skill of letting go. In this
post, I will discuss this most crucial and challenging parenting skill,
all in the service of your athlete’s better play, richer enjoyment of
their sport, healthier relationship with you, and better life. Yes, the
stakes are that high.
Sport
psychologists, studying the social milieu of the athlete, have derived a
rubric for the levels of involvement by parents and their young
athlete. Basing their work on research conducted in the area of school
involvement by parents, they have declared that sport parents fall into
three categories: underinvolved, supportive and overinvolved (Hellstedt,
1987; Hellstedt, 1990; Fredericks & Eccles, 2004).* In the eyes of
these researchers, underinvolved parents produced athletes who were
apathetic about their sport involvement, while overinvolved parents
produced athletes who showed high levels of stress, performance anxiety
and burn out (Fredericks & Eccles, 2004). According to them,
overinvolved parents had a deleterious effect on their athletes’
performance because the athlete absorbed a message of perfectionism, a
cognitive distortion which has been proven to be corrosive of peak
performance (Anshel & Eom, 2002).** It is also easy to see how
laboring under the cloak of perfectionism--explicitly or implicitly
communicated--could lead to burn out in the young athlete. In this
post, I will elaborate on the position of the overinvolved parent, since
it is the most destructive for the young athlete not only because it is
so lethal to peak performance, but also because it interferes with so
many of the positive developmental gains sport participation offers.
The Pygmalion Syndrome.
Think about Pygmalion, the sculptor from Greek mythology who created a
sculpture of his ideal woman and then prayed to Venus that she come to
life. The myth has been converted to the stage (“Pygmalion” by G.B.
Shaw) and the musical theater (“My Fair Lady”). The myth has become a
metaphor not just for the ardent wish of the artist to have his art have
a life beyond his or her imaginings, but for the kind of control that
the creative power wants to exert over its product. Thus, the creation
becomes more a projection or mirror of the creator than an entity in its
own right. So, too, with overcontrolling sport parents. The young
athlete becomes not just a project but a product, whose athletic prowess
will gain a glory (entrance to elite college, college scholarship,
lucrative professional career) that will ultimately reflect back on the
parent. While the parent may succeed in creating this product, it is my
contention that both parent and athlete lose a great deal in this
overcontrolling configuration. But, no doubt, the wages on the young
athlete are more costly. One price is that the athlete loses track of
why they participate in their sport, and a split opens up in the athlete
between their true self that would rather quit and a false self that
continues on in the sport for the parents’ sake, divorced from the
passion and joy of sport participation. The fallout from this dynamic
can be quite severe, from dispirited performance on the low end of the
spectrum to frayed parent-child relations and quitting the sport on the
further end of the spectrum. On the furthest end is the kind of
dismaying behavior we see in the dysfunctional athlete: performance
slumps, terrible conduct problems, and addictive behaviors. Think here
of famous Pygmalion sport parents and the very troubled behavior of the
offspring: Stefano Capriati and Jennifer, Mike Agassi and Andre, Earl
Woods and Tiger, John McEnroe Sr. and Jr., Richard Williams and Venus
and Serena. It is my contention that Agassi’s descent into
methamphetamine addiction and Tiger’s into his sex addiction, were
attempts to ford the gap created between the false self created by the
parent and the true self languishing inside the athlete, a self
obscured by the parents’ hard-driving control and choreography of the
child’s life.
Whose Experience is this?
Connected to this creation of the false self is the idea that the
overinvolved parent has blurred the gap between the child’s experience
and the parent’s. That is, in overcontrolling every element of the
child’s sporting life, with an extreme ego orientation, the experience
comes to mean so much more for the parent than for the child. The child
is slotted into Pygmalion’s master plan in a way that completely
overlooks and even overrides the child’s wishes for the experience. The
creator of the plan comes first and the child second. In my
qualitative study comparing American and international elite squash
players, one difference between the cohorts was remarkable: for the
American squash player, the entire experience was one of being pulled
ever closer into the parents’ orbit and plans for the child, while for
the international players, the experience of coming through the squash
ranks was one of increasing independence and distance from the parents.
American squash players were told who would coach them, how often they
would have lessons, which events to play and which colleges to apply to.
International players traveled to events on their own, were coached by
people unknown to the parents and created their own goals and
aspirations for their squash achievement. Thus, the international crowd
was able to pull important developmental gains in the areas of
individuation and self formation, gains that were thus postponed for the
American cohort. Anecdotal evidence strongly suggested that the
international group practiced with greater focus, competed with greater
fire and spent less time injured than their American counterparts.
Letting Go.
So, what’s to be done? What does letting go look like? Well, the
first step of letting go involves letting go of the result. If you have
an end result of your child’s sport participation in mind, you will
lose sight of the process and you will become ever more anxious when
things look as though they are deviating from your plan. This kind of
anxiety, like all forms of the emotion, cause us to grip tighter, become
less mindfully present and more rigidly committed to the old plan.
This rigidity can translate to exerting even more force on your young
athlete to conform to the plan. Instead, you can, starting from very
early on in the athlete’s encounter with sport, invest the young athlete
with increasing agency over practice and play time, coaching and
tournament selections. It’s not that you can’t point out the
consequences of the athlete’s choices (less practice time generally
results in worse results), but their practice, play and pleasure will
always be greater when the choice is theirs. And you can certainly
provide pep talks through motivational troughs, if they communicate that
they’re feeling flat. Such morale boosters will go a long way, and
they need to hear from you and everyone in their social milieu that hard
works pays off. But the well attuned parent-athlete dyad will know
when the parent is motivating the child into the parent’s plan or
helping the child articulate and actualize their own plan. Clearly, the
key element here is an open and honest communication pattern between
parent and athlete, one that values both the agency of the athlete as
well as the mature and tutelary powers of the parent.
It
is by no means my contention that letting go is easy. Indeed, it might
be the hardest parenting or life skill that we ever hope to acquire.
But our lives and our relationships with the people we love the most
depend upon it. Someone once told me that if you read the creation
story in Genesis, God’s hand in creation recedes with each of the
passing six days. It is the writer’s way of suggesting that God is
increasingly practicing the letting go skill even as he applies the
finishing touches. “You take it from here,” He seems to be saying to
us. Looking back at the arc of human history, many might wish that He
had held on a little tighter. But, I like to think that the writer of
Genesis was using the metaphor of being a parent when he wrote that
creation story. What great insight into the generative process. If the
Old Testament God can let go, you can too. Create something, love it
with all your might, & set it free.
*Hellstedt, J. (1987). The coach-parent-athlete relationship. The Sport Psychologist, 1, 151-160.
Hellstedt,
J. (1990). Early adolescent perceptions of parental pressure in the
sport environment. Journal of Sport Behavior, 13, 3.
Fredericks,
J., & Eccles, J. (2004). Parental influences on youth involvement
in sports. In M.R. Wiess (Ed.), Developmental sport and exercise
physiology: A lifespan perspective. Morgantown, NY: Fitness Information
Technology, Inc.
**Anshel,
M. & Eom, H.J. (2002). Exploring the dimensions of perfectionism in
sport. International Journal of Sports Psychology, 34, 3, 255-271.
This makes me think of the importance of mirroring in parenting: children (and adolescents) know the difference between mirroring and projecting, between the pleasure of recognizing themselves in our responses to them and the alienation of feeling that we have somehow missed them by failing to reflect back to them a self that feels familiar and safe. This means, I think, acknowledging their failures, too, and letting them experience those failures, offering empathy and speaking to their efforts and to their disappointment with all the love we feel.
ReplyDeleteThank you for this thoughtful response and please excuse the tardiness of my reply: You have hit the nail on the head. I think there is a way to recognize and "speak empathically" to failures in a way that makes those failures a positive developmental step, rather than a developmental sticking point. Failure avoidance is a major problem in athletes, weened on "everyone wins" sports programming, and parents who seek to arrange their child's world to avoid losing. Thanks for reading and replying.
Delete"One price is that the athlete loses track of why they participate in their sport"
ReplyDeleteAt the end of the day playing sports has to be something the child wants to do because they love doing it, not just because their mom or dad wants them to. Of course kids want to make their parents happy, but parents can turn youth sports into something that is a have-to and not a love-to. It's not about mom and dad!
Agreed.
Deletehttp://cardboard-sports.blogspot.com/
Thanks for reading, Jodi. It's so hard to make it not about mom and dad, but that's the work, I think. It's so important to try to get it right, and there is such bad fall out from getting it wrong, or from the lack of mirroring that happens when we get it wrong. Denise (see above) is so right to bring out this mirroring piece. Thanks so much for reading.
Delete