Vlog: Build Self-esteem in Your Young Athletes

Source: CC0

Building your children's self-esteem is one of the most important developmental tasks you can provide them. Self-esteem, as the plethora of research has shown, is vital to children developing into successful, happy, and contributing adults.

Sports are a venue in which children are exposed to experiences and challenges that can foster healthy and resilient self-esteem. Developing sports skills, competing, working as a team, listening to their coaches, and, yes, having both success and failure are opportunities rife for elevating how children feel about themselves and building self-esteem.

Parents can play a vital role in the impact of sport on their young athletes. Here are some key things parents can do.

Provide your children with opportunities to participate in sports from a young age. The sooner they can get involved in sports, the sooner, and more impactfully, it will leave a positive stamp on their self-esteem.

Allow your children to experience success. This suggestion doesn't just mean winning, but, at an early age, an emphasis on skill development and improvement will help them develop a sense of competence in themselves and a sense of confidence in what they believe they are capable of doing as athletes and as people.

Let your kids fail. These days, it seems that parents are terrified for their children to fail, so they give them easy wins or blame away failure. Yet, learning to deal with failure is essential to the development of healthy self-esteem because it shows kids that failure is not only not a bad thing, but also important for growth and later success.

Encourage risk taking. When kids take reasonable risks, they learn that risks don't always pay off and also that true success can't result without taking chances. When "baked" into their self-esteem, children are willing to take risks to succeed.

Give your children ownership of their sports participation. When you let them make age-appropriate decisions, they develop one essential aspect of self-esteem, namely, that they have agency (read control) over their lives.

Focus on the process rather than getting caught up in results. An over-emphasis on results at an early age can lead to fear of failure and insecure self-esteem. When you talk about their effort, how they performed, and how much fun they had in their sport, they get the message that it's the process that matters most (contrary to what our youth sports culture often conveys). Moreover, paradoxically, this process focus often produces better results.

To watch this Sport Parenting vlog segment on how to build self-esteem in your young athletes, click here.

Want to be the best sport parent you can be? Take a look at my online course, Prime Sport Parenting 505: Raise Successful and Happy Athletes .