Your Child, Competitive Sports, and Failure
So here we are! Competition weekend has finally arrived. Your child, your favorite athlete, has put in countless hours of hard work for this day. You’re almost as nervous as they are (and so are we!), maybe even worse. After all, we’ve been around a lot longer, and we know failure. It’s not easy to think of your child potentially experiencing it. So, let’s talk for a minute about mental health and competitive sports. Mental well being is an often overlooked component of fitness, but it’s one of the most important.
We strive at Michigan Cheer Company to check in with our students and coaches on a regular basis. If someone isn’t feeling their best mentally and physically, we want to know it. It’s no secret that anxiety and depression are at all time highs in children and adolescents. In a society where so many opportunities are in abundance, more expectations than ever before are placed on our children and teens. Throw in all the challenges of 2020, and it’s been a recipe for increased anxiety and depression. It’s our goal to normalize emotional fitness as much as we normalize physical fitness; to set a tone of discipline without damage.
How can you, as parents, help? Exercise in itself is a positive mediator between the child and anxiety/depression. Experts recommend that children and adolescents take part in at least 60 minutes of exercise per day to maintain healthy body weight, improve mood, and decrease symptoms of anxiety and depression. We all want more socialization right now, and life for everyone to return to normal. But, is competition one pressure to many for a child already suffering from anxiety and depression? Or does competition still teach healthy life skills? It turns out that competition, especially in regards to team sports, can actually be good for mental health. Team sports, it turns out, offers more mental health benefits than individual sports.
The primary factors are outlook towards joining the sport, combined with mechanisms for coping with failure. Both team and individual sports encourage physical exercise, promote bone density, improve mood, and decrease symptoms of depression and anxiety. (1) Both team and individual sports are fantastic ways to promote healthy levels of exercise, along with all of those health benefits and feel good endorphins. Team sports have the added benefit of socialization, and allow your child to develop healthy relationships.
But here is another thing with team sports, vs. individual sports. They are competing as a team, and if they fail, they fail as a team. When an individual athlete fails, the loss is personal and direct. A personal and direct loss can be motivating and also teach valuable lessons, absolutely. But to a child or adolescent already experiencing anxiety or depression, it’s harder to cope with and bounce back from personal failure. Team sports offer built in companions and accountability partners. Often with team sports, children and adolescents join as much for fun and socialization as they do for competition. With individual sports, the competition component is there from the very beginning.
However, while team sports tend to offer more benefits in terms of mental health than individual sports, both are considered healthier than inactivity. As much as we dread seeing our children fail, it will happen. Here are some tips for coping with competitive failure: (2)
Embrace Failure. Be open with your athlete and let them know that failure will happen. It’s ok to fail, and that they will bounce back.
Allow your athlete to fail securely. Allowing an athlete to fail while in the safe confines of your home or team environment helps the athlete to build life skills and cope with failure in a healthy cognitive manner.
Teach your athlete to “fail forward”. There is a world of difference between placing blame on failure, and in recognizing errors. Placing blame makes the athlete feel as if they are a failure as a person. But allowing for mistakes allows for growth, and for the athlete to bounce back.
Teach your athlete when to recognize circumstances beyond their control, and when to let go. It’s ok to let go of failure also. Not every game or skill is at our feet. Teaching your athlete to let go is as important as teaching them to try their best.
There won’t always be failures. In fact, there will be seasons of fantastic wins and achievements. Competitions, like life in general, is a balance. But by preparing for failure, you set your athlete up for success.
Works Cited
“Learning from Mistakes: Why We Need to Let Children Fail.” Bright Horizons®, 2021, www.brighthorizons.com/family-resources/the-importance-of-mistakes-helping-children-learn-from-failure.
“Learning from Mistakes: Why We Need to Let Children Fail.” Bright Horizons®,2021,www.brighthorizons.com/family-resources/the-importance-of-mistakes-helping-children-learn-from-failure.
written by Leigh Miller Agency