Vlog: Send Healthy Messages to Your Young Athletes

Vlog: Send Healthy Messages to Your Young Athletes
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In this week’s vlog segment, I explore the importance of the messages you send to your young athletes. I believe that “your children become the messages you get the most.” You want to make sure that the messages you send to them will encourage them to enjoy their sports participation, perform their best, achieve their athletic goals, and learn the essential life lessons that sports can teach them.

Unfortunately, your young athletes are bombarded by messages that are often not healthy from their peers, coaches, teams, and our current youth sports culture. Messages such as “it’s all about me,” “Win at all cost,” and “I’m the best” are pervasive in our youth sports culture that has lost touch with the real value of youth sports.

You want to make sure that your messages get to your children early and often, so as to immunize them (or at least reduce their impact) against those unhealthy messages. This involves two steps. First, understanding what messages you want your young athletes to get. Second, how to best convey those positive messages to them.

There are five messages you want to communicate to your children about their sports participation:

  1. You are loved, safe, and competent.
  2. There are important life skills you can learn from sports (e.g., confidence, focus, resilience).
  3. You can find happiness, meaning, and success in your sports participation.
  4. We want you to use sports to become a good person.
  5. Last, but not least, have fun out there!

To learn more about the positive and healthy messages you want to send to your young athletes, watch this week’s vlog segment.

Want to be the best sport parent you can be? Take a look at my Prime Sport Parenting 505: Raising Successful and Happy Young Athletes online course.

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