The Mistake Sports Parents Must Avoid After Their Child Loses
If you are a serious sports parent like me, it’s quite easy to go overboard with coaching after your child loses. Sometimes this is helpful, most times it’s not. However, the fact is, parents who love sports just can’t help themselves.
So, here is a word of caution and a tip to make your unwanted coaching a little less unwanted. One of the biggest mistakes a parent can make after their child loses or makes a mistake is continuing to remind them what they did wrong. All this does is cause the athlete to ruminate over their errors, which is not only unhelpful, but hurts performance severely.
As stated by sports phycologist Vietta E. Wilson, Erik Peper, and Andrea Schmid in the textbook Applied Sport Psychology:
Each time athletes recite (verbally or mentally) a previous failure, they condition their mind to make the failure the preferred motor pattern. The verbal retelling to others or the chronic rumination on why one made a mistake is a type of global visual-motor behavior rehearsal in which one is training the mind to perform the same failure behavior again.
With this in mind, if you just can’t help yourself when it comes to coaching up your child after they make a mistake, consider reframing your approach. Instead of replaying their mistake back to them, replay the same experience back to them with them not making the mistake.
Indeed, athletes don’t have to relive their failures to learn from them. What they must do is identify the new behavior to replace the old behavior and relive that experience as a success as they visualize the new behavior. As a parent, this is what you can help your child with. While they still may not want this help, at least it would be helpful to teach them the mental skills they need to practice positive behavior visualization.