Talent ID

Clues for Successful Youth Sports Parenting

Clues for Successful Youth Sports Parenting

Parents play a vital role in supporting their child to participate in youth sport. Parents are quite literally the driver, providing both the opportunity and transportation. Youth sports parenting is a full time job in itself, demanding considerable investment in terms of both money and time. It is parental support that affords kids the opportunity to participate and derive the myriad benefits associated with youth sports, which span athletic, health, scholastic, and life skill realms. Naturally, parents are invested in their child’s youth sports participation, and this investment often leads to increasing involvement. Yet despite the best intentions there are adverse consequences when parental involvement or intervention becomes excessive. In this Informed Blog post we unravel the complexity and challenges of being the parent of a youth sports athlete, and attempt to offer some clues to help guide parents to walk this fine line at different phases in the youth sports journey.

The Burden of Advantage in Athlete Development

The Burden of Advantage in Athlete Development

The paradoxical burden of advantages is something that those who work with young athletes (and young people in general) often grapple with. We might consider this a 'first world problem of privilege' for developing athletes; some might even argue it is symptomatic of the wider ills of modern society. Whether or not you subscribe to such views, few would disagree that a sense of entitlement is the enemy when developing young people, regardless of whether the aim is that they grow up to become good people or top athletes. In either scenario, many of the qualities we are seeking to instill are much the same.

As we will explore in this post, the luxury of advantages, unless carefully managed, can pose a serious problem when our aim is fostering the traits necessary to strive for mastery and achieve long-term success in sport. We will investigate what makes a conducive environment for developing young athletes who demonstrate 'talent', and what pitfalls to avoid. Finally, we will tackle the question of how we might negotiate the challenges we presently face on our quest, and recommend practical steps to ensure young athletes are equipped with the fuel for the journey and the tools to overcome obstacles on the path to becoming elite.

Perils of the 'Talent' Label

Perils of the 'Talent' Label

Athletic talent and sporting potential are hard to define and harder still to capture. Such ambiguity presents a major challenge for 'talent identification' and 'talent development' programmes in sport. Marking out a youngster as 'talented' is not only fraught with uncertainty, doing so can also carry negative consequences for their development moving forward. In this post we will explore the topic of 'talent' and discuss the challenges inherent in the processes of talent identification and development. In light of these issues we will examine how we might best nurture and develop young athletes whilst avoiding the pitfalls that can result from labeling them as 'talented'.