Notes

1. Sports should be fun. Emphasize to your young athlete that sports and other activities in life are enjoyable for the playing, whether you win or lose. Athletes should be participating, first and foremost, to have fun. Try to raise your child to enjoy many activities in and of themselves so that winning is not a condition for enjoyment.
2. Anything worth achieving is rarely easy. There is nothing disgraceful about it being a long and difficult process to master something. Becoming the best athlete one can be is not an achievement to be had merely for the asking. Practice, practice, and still more practice is needed to master any sport.
3. Mistakes aren’t a necessary part of learning anything well. Very simply, if we don't make mistakes, we probably won't learn. Emphasize to your child that mistakes, rather than being things to avoid at all cost stepping stones to success. They give us the information we need to adjust and improve. The only true mistake is a failure to learn from our mistakes.
4. Effort is what counts. Emphasize and praise effort as well as outcome. Communicate repeatedly to your young
athlete that all you ask is that he or she give total effort. Through your actions and your words, show your child that he or she is just as important to you when trying and failing as when succeeding. If maximum effort is acceptable to you, it can also become acceptable to your young athlete. Above all, do not punish or withdraw love and approval when he or she doesn't perform up to expectations. It is such punishment that builds fear of failure.
5. Do not confuse worth with performance. Help youngsters to distinguish what they do from what they are. A
valuable lesson for children to learn is that they should never identify their worth as people with any particular part of themselves, such as their competence in sports, their school performance, or their physical appearance. You can further this process by demonstrating your own ability, to accept your child unconditionally as a person, even when you are communicating that you don't approve of some behavior. Also, show your child that you can gracefully accept your awn mistakes and failures. Show and tell your child that as a fallible human being, you can accept the fact that despite your best efforts, you are going to occasionally bungle things. If children can learn to accept and like
themselves, they will not unduly require the approval of others in order to feel worthwhile.
6. Pressure is something you put on yourself. Help your young athlete to see competitive situations as exciting self- 2006 USA Swimming and The U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association. All Rights Reserved.
challenges rather than as threats. Emphasize that he or she can choose how to think about pressure situations. The above attitudes will help to develop an outlook on pressure that transforms it into a challenge and an opportunity to test them and to achieve something worthwhile.
7. Try to like and respect sport opponents. Some coaches and athletes think that proper motivation comes from anger or hatred for the opponent. We disagree. Sports should promote sportsmanship and an appreciation that opponents, far from being the "enemy," are fellow athletes who make it possible to compete. Hatred can only breed stress and fear. In terms of emotional arousal, fear and anger are indistinguishable patterns of physiological responses. Thus, the arousal of anger can become the arousal of fear if things begin to go badly during a contest. College football
coach Tom Osborne preaches respect far the opponent because, in his experience, "Athletes who play in a generally
relaxed environment where there's goodwill toward their opponents are less fearful and play better."