Chris Mance II - Mental Skills Coach

Two weeks ago I wrote about the rising levels of depression among children. Research shows that one of the best things a parent can do to reduce this risk of depression is to raise resilient kids.  I believe getting both girls and boys to participate in youth wrestling is the perfect way to achieve this.

If you do a simple google search for the characteristics required for resilience, most credible sources reference anywhere from 7 to 10 attributes. Below, I break down the most important of these attributes and how youth wrestling helps develop each of them.

Youth Wrestling Builds a Belief-System that Hard Work Pays Off  

Many child psychologist like to call this as having a “internal locus of control“. This means that a child doesn’t depend on hope, luck, or other external factors to achieve success. What’s more, a child never feels helpless or powerless about the future.

Instead, when a child has an internal locus of control they believe that hard work pays off and understand the connection between the cause and effect of their actions. As long as he or she puts the time, focus, and effort into a goal, they believe that they can achieve anything. Even after a failure, when you have an internal locus of control, you can bounce back and still achieve your goal.

Youth wrestling is the perfect sport to instill this belief system in a child.
Wrestling is one of the few sports where you can neutralize an opponent’s natural talent by training harder and building more technical skills. Every wrestler learns from the very beginning that the more they train, practice, and compete the more they will improve.

Youth wrestling is truly the ultimate hard work pays off sport for kids.

Youth Wrestling Shows Kids How to Set Short and Long Term Goals

Every new wrestler starts at the bottom and has to work their way up. In order to do this, goals are needed.

Setting and achieving goals is an important component of developing resilient children. Furthermore, teaching a child how to delay gratification and work step by step to achieve a difficult goal is not something that you can teach in a classroom. A child must experience the challenges of facing obstacles and learn how to grind through those obstacles.

Youth wrestling teaches children how to set short-term and long-term goals and celebrate the small victories along the way. While other kids are playing video games, wrestlers are required to sacrifice much of their free time in order to achieve these goals.

Youth Wrestling Teaches Self-awareness and Emotional Management

Having self-awareness of your emotions helps you mange those emotions and recover faster from negative experiences. The ability to recover from emotional let downs is a critical component of resilience.

I’ve come across very few wrestlers in my 32 years of being around the sport who never cried after losing. Knowing how to manage emotions after losing in front of your friends and family is a learned skill. Because of this, youth wrestling is the perfect environment to develop self-awareness of emotions and learn how to manage them.

Whether it comes from getting dominated by a better opponent or losing a heart breaking 1 point match in overtime, losing a wrestling match is always emotionally painful. However, with each loss comes a valuable lesson in emotional management that serves as an invaluable life skill.

Youth Wrestling Helps Kids Eliminate The Victim Mentality

If you want to overcome a real world crisis, then it’s essential to have a survivor’s mentality instead of a victim’s mentality. Victims make excuses for why they can’t do something, survivors make excuses for why they can.

Many beginner wrestlers start off viewing themselves as victims when they lose.

• A victim of a bad call by the referee
• A victim of an opponent who is older or who has more experience
• Or a victim of of an opponent who was bigger or stronger

Wrestling teaches you that the victim mentality is for losers. Making excuses becomes a thing of the past as you develop and grow as a wrestler.

Youth Wrestling Shows Kids that Adversity is a Challenge to Get Stronger

There are only a few things in life that can completely exhaust you within 6 minutes.

Wrestling is one of those things. It requires the use of every muscle in your body to impose your will against someone doing the same thing to you. What’s more, the only way to get better at wrestling is to train with another wrestler who is better.

Wrestling is actually a sport that requires you to lose in order to win. With this in mind, learning how to face and overcome adversity becomes the name of the game. There is no other way to simulate this type of real world experience of using adversity to make you stronger.