It’s vital to realize that the following suggestions nurture both children’s long-term successful performance and healthy personal development.
I have 5 communications that are most relevant pre-match, and 5 that are most relevant post-match:
Before Competition…
Commandment 1.) Expose Children to Growth Opportunities
It’s critical for parents to encourage children’s exposure to tennis challenges and unfairness because these experiences provide children with chances to build required resilience.
Since resilience development can come at the cost of short-term discomfort, this is especially challenging for most parents. But just like muscles need resistance to grow, so does a healthy mind.
So, by trying to see unfairness and difficulties as growth opportunities, and encouraging their child’s exposure to tennis stress such as being cheated or unfairly not being selected on a team, parents can actually empower the ability to overcome future adversity.
Commandment 2.) Encourage Choice and Decision Making
While our human history of group living has resulted in us always being regulated to a degree by our social relationships, all growing children also need to develop a sense of personal control and competence to influence life outcomes. It’s also important to support children’s development of sound decision making skills by encouraging them to explore options and likely outcomes from possible sport decisions.
Done with support, children can learn to initiate their own plans of action and develop belief in their ability to make sound decisions.
Commandment 3.) Support High Expectations
Parents sometimes unknowingly communicate low expectations, which result in a lack of self-belief and achievement drive in players, or unrealistically high expectations, which leads to increased anxiety and continual frustration (maladaptive perfectionism). But when parents balance realistically high expectations by encouraging children to challenge themselves and communicating belief that they can be successful, players can take on tennis challenges with less frustration and fear.
Commandment 4.) Provide Appropriate Support
Appropriate support requires a balance between under support where parents communicate a lack of interest in their child’s tennis participation, and over-involvement.
Often an over involved parent responds to tennis challenges based on their own ‘difficult internal experiences’ rather than their child’s best interest. The middle ground would see parents provide logistical/ emotional support in a way that the child recognizes that his/her parents invest in his/her tennis for his/her benefit.
Commandment 5.) Normalize Difficult Internal Experiences (also after matches)
Children can develop the sense that there’s something wrong with them when parents don’t provide a comfortable atmosphere to talk about difficult internal experiences related to tennis such as nerves and frustration. But when parental sport conversations encourage discussion of internal experiences they’re nurturing children’s self-awareness and acceptance.
During these conversations it’s also vital to communicate that ‘difficult internal experiences’ related to tennis are normal, which further encourages children’s adaptive responding to these experiences.
After Competition…
Commandment 6.) Encourage Problem Solving
Long-term difficulties can arise when, in attempts to help, parents attempt to fix difficult tennis outcomes that could potentially be solved by children, especially during adolescence when brains are made to increasingly respond to autonomy (personal influence).
Over time these actions can lead to helpless tendencies. It’s therefore important for parents to encourage children to solve problems in and around tennis on their own while providing encouragement, before offering direct assistance.
Commandment 7.) Set Behavioral Expectations and Consequences
Parents should require children to give their best effort, and behave appropriately (respect opponents, etc) during matches. Before competition, parents should discuss consequences for not meeting these expectations, and consistently enforce these consequences when required.
Commandment 8.) Focus on Strengths
When parents consistently focus on weaknesses, flaws can become central to their child’s attention. But by recognizing and reinforcing children’s efforts and strengths regardless of tennis outcomes parents nurture children’s competence.
Over time by consistently focusing on children’s strengths they will come to internalize these messages and automatically ‘see’ themselves and the world from a perspective of self-belief. This will encourage further exploration, pursuit of challenge, and eventual success. But when parents go overboard in communicating ‘fake praise”, children will see through this, which results in parent communications losing meaning. What I am advocating is simply, on balance, to more often point out children’s competencies than weaknesses.
Commandment 9.) Encourage Personal Control
While exposing children to tennis related stress is important, how parents respond to children’s stressful experiences is also vital. It’s important that parents encourage children to focus on controllable factors such as hard work and persistence in overcoming adversity rather than selection or luck.
If parents can successfully communicate that in the long-term it’s children’s controllable actions that will determine their fate, not external or unchangeable factors, they’ll develop the belief that they can influence tennis outcomes and respond well to the difficulties and setbacks that arise.
Commandment 10.) Communicate Unconditional Positive Regard
It’s absolutely crucial for parents to communicate acceptance of their children regardless of performance. When parents communicate love conditionally by tying special rewards/attention to
winning, or removing affection or attention for losing, it has devastating effects on children.
They learn that they’re competing for their parents’ approval making self-worth dependent on high performance. The fun of competition is then replaced by pressure and losing tends to feel shameful.
Parents can communicate unconditional regard in tennis by providing attention, affection, and approval verbally and non-verbally, regardless of children’s performance.