Teaching Competition and Achievement

Lawrence M. Scheier, Ph.D.

Perhaps the most overlooked role in developing youth soccer players is the contribution to sportsmanship, competitive spirit and achievement orientation that comes directly from parents.

It is clear that achievement has its roots in the home, where parents slowly shape values promoting academic, personal, social, and cultural success. Parents remind their children of homework assignments, even help their children finish projects, buying supplies and often having a hand in the creative process.

Parents also share tidbits here and there regarding study skills and teach their children different ways to address scholarship overall. They also encourage (or even discourage) friendships and help their children negotiate peer influences and the hardships of teenage romance. Parents encourage their children to seek higher and loftier goals, including college, and put education in perspective as a way to ensure financial security, even in the worst of economic times.

More importantly, parents are a powerful source of learning when it comes to competition, often teaching their children how to handle themselves both on and off the pitch. There are some parents who instruct their child to strike back when fouled and others that blend in the rules of fair play as part of competition.

While many have argued the "game is the best teacher," parents at least play a close second in terms of how they teach youth about the philosophy of competition and what it takes to be a leader both on and off the field.

There is no single way that parents teach achievement and the value of competition. As role models, parents can inculcate sportsmanship directly by playing sports themselves and using those examples to instruct their children. Calvin Hill, a graduate of Yale University, was a star running back in the NFL (Dallas Cowboys, Washington Redskins, and Cleveland Browns) and his son Grant Hill became a star basketball legend at Duke University and currently plays for the NBA Phoenix Suns. The Manning brothers, Eli and Peyton, can thank their dad Archie Manning for some instruction on throwing motion, but an equal amount of rearing and instruction can be attributed to their mother. There are countless examples of professional athletes whose children benefited from direct instruction.

However, there are numerous other ways parents can teach achievement motivation and foster yearning for competition. One important avenue involves reinforcing the value of competition and sports by encouraging youth to build competence through mastery. Parents can identify the value of sports and reinforce to their children that sports is an important part of life but not bigger than life. By continually striving for excellence on the pitch, parents can remind their child to exploit the same level of commitment off the pitch, with equal results.

There are many faces to the intricate process of how parents teach competition. One area of concern is the differences between teaching boys and girls. In other words, as many parents know, we have to pay strict attention to the practice of gender socialization in the home. The idea of gender socialization comes from Freudian notions that girls will "identify" with their mothers while boys will seek instruction and fortitude from their fathers. This is all structured to make the point that eventually girls must learn about caregiving of the young while boys must venture out into the world, contributing to the labor force.

While times are considerably different today than when the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud lived in Vienna, Austria, there is a good deal of truth to the fact that relationships between a daughter and mother are colored slightly differently than one between a father and son. A good deal of research also shows that when instructing their children, fathers focus more on mastery and skills while mothers pay greater attention to intimacy and relational issues.

How this plays out in terms of athletic competition is still open to debate and requires further research. Both are needed, as is made obvious by team chemistry and the personification of leadership on the pitch. A quick look at the sheer number of soccer moms today would dictate that mothers are clearly interested — if not heavily invested — in promoting athletic endeavors in their children. Across the board, women are becoming increasingly active as coaches, administrators and club directors, and bear the torch of responsibility while providing impetus for change.

A very important component of sports training is recognition that children incorporate various forms of behavior, attitudes and beliefs primarily from their parents. In other words, children (here I include older youth as well) view their parents as role models and use their parents' views of them to build self-esteem. When a child believes his parents see them in a positive light, the incandescence of the light casts a bright glow.

Many parents wonder if their child looks like them and acts like them, but the close resemblance goes far beyond looks. When presented with problems, children often look to their parents for solutions, and glean from their parents how to make decisions, how to untangle messy affairs that crop up in life (friendships), and how to resolve difficult situations. This pseudo resilience is where kids learn to navigate the difficult times in life. Parents who tell their child they have what it takes to compete at a high level will surely contribute to the child's self-esteem and begin to put into motion a complete sense of self.

However, parents should also be aware of the gender differences that exist in the realm of influence. Girls are notably more influenced by the thoughts of others; they are more interpersonally sensitive, more attuned to other people's judgments, and more reliant on others' standards of behavior. Thus, girls are more inwardly reflective than boys and this can stifle athletic competition if coaches are not sensitive in their choice of words, criticize too often, and fail to produce realistic standards.

There is also evidence from developmental studies that shows fathers incur the wrath of teenage daughters differently than mothers. In other words, fathers begin to drift away from their daughters when their little girls grow up and these changes surface in terms of topics discussed (girls talk more about their physical development to their mothers), expression of affect and emotion, negative confrontations and so forth.

One way to assess these differences is to monitor parent-child confrontations in laboratory problem-solving situations (how many times each party interrupts the other) or ask the teens and parents to report on the conflicts they experience in the home and compare answers. These latter "dyadic" studies have been instrumental in showing us that fathers and mothers deal differently with conflict, independence, achievement and social-emotional growth.

For example, in the early part of childhood, fathers have been observed to play physically more frequently and to tussle more with their children than mothers, but mothers resolve conflict more often. The truth is that while mothers get into hissy fits and tangle with their teenage daughters as frequently as do fathers, there is still some unique and enduring emotional bond that surfaces between daughters and their mothers.

Still, we know relatively little about how either parent addresses sports and competition and whether some of these noted gender "socialization" differences surface in the education parents provide for athletic competition. For instance, how does variation in mother-child versus father-child experiences play out on the pitch and, "Whose advice takes precedence?"

Admiration and emulation are key operative terms we see in the process of "identification." In other words, as youth struggle to manage the complex world, they often turn to their parents as examples of how to handle stressful situations. Throughout all their activities — cleaning house, fixing the car, doing errands and driving their kids to soccer games — parents are viewed by children as role models.

Losing, on the pitch, is the one example that comes to mind where parents can instill pride and ownership and practice being a role model. How parents teach the value of "losing" is what makes us all uniquely different. Many parents follow the credo of Anson Dorrance, head coach of the UNC Tar Heel women's soccer team that recently won the 2009 national championship. Dorrance quietly and prophetically believes that losing builds character. Losing is a form of adversity and how a young person learns to deal with adversity is telling not only for the present moment, in the heat of competition, but also for years to come. We can't all win all the time. If we were to win all the time, we would never develop any "perspective" on what makes us compete at a higher level and want to covet the winner's trophy even more.

Parents can "coach" their child, but must be careful to ensure they are teaching their child lessons for life and not to gain immediate satisfaction or quell an immediate problem. Take, for example, a game in which the first half score is 2-0 for the opponent and the second half 0-1 for the opponent. A parent can chide their son or daughter for losing to a team that "you should have beaten." A different tactic might consider advising their child they played inconsistently in the first half, but played much better in the second half, showing courage and spirit. Granted the resulting score has the child's team losing, 2-1, but there is a moral victory here that teaches children about competition. There is victory in every moment of athletic competition, even if it comes half-by-half, play-by-play, moment-by-moment.

When all is said and done, perhaps the single greatest tool parents have is their voice. That is, parents can communicate to their children all the nuances and specialties that will make them successful in life. Parents need first to take the time to communicate (frequency) and then consider the context of what they say.

Narrative analyses of parent-child communication often reveals that parents infrequently address very important issues like drug use or other health-compromising behaviors. Also, parents use a variety of tactics or strategies when communicating, resorting sometimes to personal experience, discussion of rule infractions ("If you do this, you will lose this"), and warnings about consequences. These conversations are not limited to drug use, but extend to the value of education ("If you attend college, you will be more successful") and the principles behind success ("All good things in life are preceded by hard work").

This framework also applies to sports, because parents encourage youth to participate for loftier goals ("Athletics is a way to gain self-confidence"). Parents invoking these overtures should remember them before, during and after a game. Win or lose, the ultimate goal is about building mastery and self-confidence, important attributes that can guide a youth through life.

Much of what we know about sports training and competition has entertained the strictly physical world where an athlete prepares for competition through hard training, including certain personal goals for developing endurance, strength, speed and conditioning. Strongly missing from this regimen is the psychological preparation needed to compete at a high level, including an awareness of what athletics does to a young mind, and how youth can prepare for a life of competition both on and off the field.

A good resource for parents to learn more about their child and how sports influence a developing young mind can be found in a book written by Debra LaPrath, titled "Coaching Girls' Soccer Successfully." In the end, it is not strong bodies that prevail, but rather strong minds that make victory enduring.

Lawrence M. Scheier, Ph.D. is a psychologist residing in Las Vegas, Nevada and can be reached electronically via e-mail at scheier@cox.net. Mitch Basin, a USSF National "D" licensed youth soccer coach contributed to the formulation of this article. He can be reached at mbasin@silverstatecu.com.