Youth Sports and the Development of Self-Esteem

Source: Illustration by Jim Phalen, used with permission

During the elementary-school years, a child's world expands dramatically to include not only their family and playmates but a widening circle of schoolmates and adults. In this enlarged environment, kids discover and judge their own abilities and begin to form a stable self-concept and feelings of self-worth. Academic and social experiences provide important information, as do the reactions of peers and adults in the child’s life. It’s during this critical period of development—between ages 6 and 12—that most children join youth sport programs. That’s why sport experiences can play such an important role in personal and social development.

What is self-esteem?

Self-esteem refers to the way we feel about our own personal traits and abilities: good or bad, valuable or worthless, and so on. Self- esteem strongly influences how we function in the world, and it’s a product of our experiences in living.

Two types of information are particularly important with regard to self-esteem development.

• Self-comparison. This process involves how we compare with others in important skills and characteristics.
• Feedback from others. This consists of how other people respond to us.

How can sport experiences have an effect on self-esteem development?

Children typically enter the world of sports at a time in their development when they are seeking information about their abilities. The kinds of motor abilities required in sports are particularly valued by them at this stage. When children enter sports, the stage is thus set for an ability test whose outcome is potentially very important.

• At the very first practice or tryout, children begin to see how they compare with their peers in this prized activity. In a very short time, children can tell how proficient they are relative to their teammates and opponents.
• Children also have many opportunities to observe how others are judging them. The reactions of coaches, parents, teammates, opponents, and spectators to their play are visible on many occasions.

It’s important to realize that many children are not yet capable of distinguishing between judgments of their abilities and judgments of their self-worth. Thus, ability judgments are not necessarily seen as evaluations of only a single physical trait but may be taken as an indication of total value as a person.

What can parents do to promote self-esteem development?

Parents must be sensitive to the impact that sport experiences can have on the child’s self-esteem. The processes just described—self-comparison and feedback from others—are going to occur in any situation in which children interact. However, their effects can be softened and viewed more realistically if understanding adults help children place sport experiences in proper perspective. There are several things parents can do.

1. Emphasize fun, participation, and skill improvement rather than winning and losing. Most children want to play a sport because they enjoy the activity for its own sake. Misinformed adults can turn that enjoyable activity into a pressurized, competitive nightmare. In such cases, fun is no longer just playing; it’s now defined as winning.
2. Emphasize striving to improve skills rather than comparing oneself with others. Physical growth and development and skill development occur at different rates in youngsters, and it’s important to make this clear to children. It’s particularly important that children whose skill development is lagging not view this as a permanent condition. Helping a youngster derive pleasure from improvement over time and praising their self-improvement efforts can create many rewarding experiences in sport—even for the athlete who never will be a star.
3. It’s also important that the highly-skilled athlete not acquire an inflated self-image, often expressed as arrogance and conceit. Again, parents should help children to understand that despite the importance of sport to them, it’s only one area of their lives.
4. Examine the conditions of worth that they hold for their children. If your young athlete must excel to get love and approval from you, if you are sending out subtle (or not so subtle) signals of disapproval when your child fails or "embarrasses" you, then you need to take a hard look at your own priorities. If, on the other hand, you’re able to communicate love and acceptance whether your child is a star or a bench warmer, then a basis for positive self-esteem development exists―regardless of your child’s eventual achievements in sports.

In themselves, sports are neither good nor bad, and competitive experiences are an important part of life. The value of participation depends on how the competition is conducted, how the situation is interpreted, and how the outcome is understood. Properly managed, youth sports can be an important training ground for competing successfully in other areas of life and for the development of positive self-esteem.