“Foot-fault!”: A Child-Centered Parenting Moment in Youth Sport

Recently, I had a very unusual encounter in my life as a squash referee.  As you might imagine, I am often the person at whom daggers of the eyes are directed, as parents don’t like a call or set of calls I made ‘against’ their child. And while I am rarely approached by a parent to explain a call, a conversation I would welcome, I have been approached with the snide question, “So, tell me, have you ever played this game?” I understand the move: they feel as though their child has been hurt or wronged, and so they want to defend their child and direct anger at the person who hurt them.  There are two problems with this scenario: the first is that they are taking their child’s temper tantrum at the call(s) rather than the referee’s line of decision making as the fuel for their ire, and secondly, they themselves don’t have much competitive experience, and therefore aren’t so clear about the best way to handle real or perceived adversity in the heat of the moment.

This recent event was different.  I was refereeing a 17-year old boy playing in a local tournament against someone several years his senior.  He lost the first few points of the first game, and then won one and came in to serve.  “Foot fault,” I called, as his foot was well across the line when he hit his serve. As often happens when you make that call, I got an incredulous look.  “Are you serious?!” He caws at me.  “Yes,” I say.  “Your back foot was well across the line by the time you struck your serve.”  Looking at the gallery for a shared sense of outrage, and not getting it, he muttered, shook his head, and went to receive serve.

After the match, in which the 17-year old lost, I was approached by his father.  While I braced for a verbal lashing about my call, the father surprised me and thanked me. He told me that his son was in a temper tantrum at the first game break about the call, asking him if he could possibly believe that he had been called on a foot fault and that I must be crazy. He told me that he responded to his son: “Yes, I believe it!  He saw your foot across the line.  Now your job is to accept the call, keep your foot in the box while you serve, and focus on what you can do to win this match.”  He thanked me for helping his son get ready for the next stage in his playing career.  (He is going off to college in the fall.)  While I could go on to tell you the many other differences between this situation and the one I’m generally in when refereeing junior tournaments, the main one here is that this father has considerable experience as a player on the professional tennis tour.  He went on to tell me: “On tour, one of the main differences between guys who made it and guys who didn’t was the amount of time the ones who didn’t spent in the locker room whining about calls they didn’t like.”

I’m not one of these “tough love” parenting types, but I will say that a parent does a child a great disservice when he sides with the rage of the child against the referee.  Regardless of whether the calls are good or bad, learning how to deal with any and all calls is an essential aspect of being effective in competition. There is an array of skills you can help your child with when they are in this situation, but colluding with them in hating, or what I call enemizing the referee, will always yield bad results.  Here are some skills you can teach your kid instead:

1)    Radical Acceptance: encourage your child to accept all calls with grace, and move on to the next point.  But, this means really accepting and really moving on.  He or she can certainly appeal to the ref for an explanation so that they understand the ref’s line of thinking and help them avoid the same situation in future points, but they must generally accept all calls and keep the yelling in their head to zero.  This may require the subsidiary skills of pacing and breathing.  Remember: a player has 10 seconds to prepare for the next point. Use them to embrace reality and re-regulate.

2)    Do not rile your child up by getting into an ‘enemy mindset’ vis-à-vis the ref.  That is, don’t look exasperated and outraged in the gallery after a call. Your child will see this and it will only increase the complaining, whining, and feelings of victimization on the part of your kid.  This mindset is not clean, it focuses the mind in the wrong direction, and often produces bad performance and worse conduct.  Therefore: you, too, must engage skill #1 above, radically accept reality and self-soothe.  Doing so will help your child do it.

3)   Encourage your child to have a polite conversation with the referee after the match to explain his calls.  There might be something that your child does not understand about the rules that will help him in future matches.  It will emerge that the referee is not, in fact, a raving lunatic.  And, having this conversation will also be an exercise in self-advocacy, an interpersonal effectiveness goal which will result in greater self-esteem.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of the skills I’ve outlined here.  Parents so often ask me how they can help their child in the fracas of competition, but they take “standing up for their kid” as so much a part of nature’s bargain that their default mode ends up being exactly the wrong track to take in the face of difficult, confusing, or even bad calls.  Using the skills I’ve outlined here will help develop a resilient, interpersonally effective athlete whose attention can be focused on the correct performance goals at the right moment.  Who knows, you might even be thanking a referee one of these days.

Sport Parents IV: Letting Go

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.

Sport Parents II: Ego & Mastery Orientations

In my last post, I wrote about the importance for sport parents of setting the proper framework for their young athlete.  This framework is the one where the player inculcates the values and attitudes of the parents and uses it as their own internal compass for their ideas and feelings about such important matters as winning and losing, the treatment of opponents and officials, and the overall meaning of the endeavor.  In that post, I called the framework around the young athlete “the amniotic air” that they breathe as they engage in their sport because while parents and children may not think or talk much about it, the athlete absorbs it with every interaction with the parent.  So, as we can see, we are dealing with a very high stakes enterprise and one that bears thoughtful consideration.  In this post, I will discuss the two most common cognitive frameworks that sport psychologists have identified as the ones that parents set for their children.

According to the experts, there are essentially two different frameworks that parents adopt and that they do so by the implicit and explicit systems of rewards they establish around their child’s sport participation.  The first one, often called an ego orientation, places as high emphasis on winning, compares their child’s results to those of other children and sees success in sport as being better than others.  The second framework, often called a mastery orientation, stresses improvement over performance, process over product, and values a child’s sport participation for the larger lessons about life and the self that sport participation offers.*  For ego-oriented parents, sport is about teaching their child to be a winner, while for mastery-oriented parents, sport is about the process of adaptive growth.  The ego-oriented parent judges the success of the endeavor on results, the mastery-oriented parent on how the child’s  sport involvement supports emotional maturation and successful social integration.  People have come to sum up the positions this way: the mastery-oriented parent says, “winning isn’t everything, it’s how you play the game,” while the ego-oriented parent says, “winning isn’t everything...it’s the only thing.”

Now, of course, many parents adopt an ego orientation quite consciously because they feel as though it’s the only way to raise a successful athlete and person, caught as we are in this cut-throat, race-to-nowhere culture.  They feel that in order to raise a winner, they need to forefront winning, and that ruthlessness trumps process every day.  But this is not true, and my research on young athletes and their social milieu suggested this truth to me pretty strongly.  Indeed, psychologists in the realms of both education and sport have strongly argued that mastery orientations provide greater motivation toward goal-directed behavior over a longer duration.**  Furthermore, parents, athletes and coaches who privilege winning to the exclusion of all else often overlook the incredible value of losing for motivating improvement, the data it provides for skill & strategy interventions, and the bright light it can shine on the athlete’s thoughts and feelings in the heat of competition.  Of course, if you have a mastery orientation, you are much more likely to attend to and mine this useful data, whereas an ego orientation seeks to sweep a loss under the carpet of easy excuses as quickly as possible.  (For a view of what some of this work looks like, see my prior post from August, 2012 “Scott’s Lytham Opportunity.”)

The next question, then, is how to put into practice some of these insights.  The first is to frame as many of your interactions about your child’s sport performance in terms of questions rather than statements.  For example: “what do you think it would take to beat so-and-so?” rather than “I think you can beat so-and-so.”  “What do you think happened in that match?” rather than “I think you could have won that match.”  “What do you think you need to work harder at?” and “where would you like to see yourself in your age group?” over “If you’d only do what I’ve been telling you to, you’d be top ten.”  “How do you think you could have better handled that bad bounce/bad call/poor seeding?” over “you were robbed!”  Additionally, you should monitor (and control) your child’s bad conduct, because behind bad conduct lie some of the most ego-oriented cognitive distortions, apart from the fact that bad conduct is almost always the tell-tale sign of poor performance.  (For more on this, see my prior post to this blog “Scattering & Husbanding” November, 2012.)  But, one thing is for sure: you cannot fake it for your young athlete.  If you engage superficially in mastery-oriented questions, but have ego-oriented answers in your heart, your reward structure and your outward behavior towards tournament officials, referees, your child’s opponents and their entourages, then your child will absorb your actions far more strongly than your words.

Often, when people compare ego and mastery orientations, they feel as though the “mastery” people stand on the side of losing over winning; that inculcating process over product teaches complacency with a middling result.  In fact, nothing is further from the truth, and let’s be clear that I’m very pro winning and strongly prefer it to the alternative.  It’s just that winning is only one aspect of successful sport performance and very often isn’t nearly the most salient feature of a particular performance.  I firmly believe, based on my years of competitive play, coaching and qualitative research, that a parent’s adoption of a mastery orientation provides a more stable base for the young athlete’s best performance to emerge, greater enjoyment of the sport for a greater length of time, more successful integration into a competitive and complex world, and even, a better relationship between parent and athlete.  And if that’s not winning, then I’m sure I don’t know what is.

*Roberts, G. & Treasure, D. (1995): Achievement goals, motivational climate and achievement strategies and behaviors in sport. International Journal of Sports Psychology, 26, 64-80.

**Turner, E., Chandler, M., & Heffer, R. (2009). The influence of parenting styles, achievement motivation, and self-efficacy on academic performance in college students. Journal of College Student Development, 50, 3, 337-346.

Sport Parents I: Setting the Frame

In the 1993 movie “Searching for Bobby Fisher” Joe Mantegna plays the father of a chess prodigy who has to learn how to manage the myriad challenges that come with shepherding a very talented child through elite-level competition, the parent-child dynamic being only one facet of this maze.  In one scene, a tournament director summons all of the parents into a room for a pre-tournament meeting.  When they are all gathered, he locks the anxiety-stricken crowd in the room and tells them he’ll be back to liberate them at the end of the tournament.  Anyone involved in youth sport can identify with this fiction.  Parents, so eager to help and do the right thing by their children, often veer from being helpful and supportive to being intrusive, controlling  and destructive of both performance and enjoyment.  Parental involvement in sport so often stems from the most natural of all parental feelings: to protect a child from harm and to celebrate a child’s natural gifts.  But often, the behaviors parents exhibit with respect to their child’s sport involvement are anything but protective or admirable.  In the next several posts, I will share some insights that I gained while doing research on this very problem with an aim toward helping parents avoid some of the understandable pitfalls of being a sport parent, while at the same time steering them towards harnessing some of the great opportunities sport involvement offers for parent and child alike.

The first aspect of this interaction that I will call your attention to is perhaps the most important of all, and what I will call setting the frame.  Parents of middle and high schoolers feel as though their children stopped listening to them a long time ago, lost as they are in their new world of intense and dramatic peer interactions, increased homework pressure and frenzied extra-curricular activities.  But this is not true.  Sport psychologists who study the social milieu of young athletes call the people in that athlete’s life ‘influencers’, and include in that lot peers, coaches and parents.  Furthermore, they add that of all of those influencers, parents are the most, not the least, influential.*  This power comes from the fact that parents often serve in two vital roles with respect to the young athlete: they both provide the experience for their child and, more importantly, interpret its meaning for the child.  It is in this latter function, that of interpreter, that parents have the most power and why I call it “setting the frame.”  The parents’ own meaning and understanding of their child’s sport participation sets the whole cognitive and emotional framework for the child.  You might call it the amniotic air that surrounds the athlete as they engage in their sport.  Parents might not see it, but their children absorb it as they breathe.  Andre Agassi, in his remarkable book, Open, vividly portrays the way a child comes to acquire the socioemotional framework of the parent.  After his first loss ever in a junior tournament, he finds that his self-talk is blisteringly self-loathing.  Lost in his misery, he contemplates quitting.  As he portrays it, it is a revealing moment:

After years of hearing my father rant at my flaws, one loss has caused me to take up his rant.  I’ve internalized my father--his impatience, his perfectionism, his rage--until his voice doesn’t just feel like my own, it is my own.  I no longer need my father to torture me.  From this day on, I can do it by myself.

Agassi is nine years old at the time of this event.

Agassi’s painful vignette speaks to a truth about parents and their children: all children internalize their parents.  That’s just part of the developmental bargain.  So, the question for sport parents is this: what kind of framework with regard to your child’s sport participation do you want them to internalize?  You can set a framework that promotes the kind of socioemotional development that participation in sport is particularly good at offering.  Or, you can set a framework that overlooks those potential gains and that proves corrosive to the kind of enthusiastic engagement, adaptive growth and longevity of participation that encapsulate the promise of healthy sport participation.

In the next post, I will talk in greater detail about how sport psychologists have thought about these two opposing frameworks and how you can cultivate one and try to avoid other.  For now, I will leave you with a quote from golfer Davis Love III’s book about his father, entitled Every Shot I Take.  The title itself should tell you about how powerful the child’s internalization of the parent is.  This quote will also give you a sense of just how opposite a force that internalizing can be than the one Andre Agassi absorbed.  In the introduction, Davis III says of Davis II:

My late father, for whom I am named, is still my hero.  He always was; he always will be....The way he introduced me to golf is the way I plan to introduce my two children to the game.  The way he taught me is the way I plan to teach them.  The he way he raised me is the way I hope to raise them.

Now, needless to say, there are many points along the spectrum between torturing perfectionist and benign tutelary force, but these two views of internalized fathers give clear proof of just what is at stake in setting the frame for your young athlete.

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* Fredericks, J., & Eccles, J.  2004.  Parental influences on youth involvement in sports.  In M. R.  Weiss, (Ed.), Developmental Sport and exercise physiology: A lifespan perspective.  Morgantown, NY: Fitness Information Technology, Inc.