“You will never be good enough. You are not trying your hardest. Why can’t you do anything right?” These are common expressions from parents who put too much emphasis on sports. The parents from the documentary, Trophy Kids, found it is essential to drive their children as if they were professional athletes, yet they were only of high school age or younger. As these parents push their children, they are doing more harm than good. These parents may believe they are using positive reinforcement, but in reality they are progressively tearing their child down. They tend to vocalize everything the child is doing wrong, rather than helping them understand what they can do to improve. Today in America, AAU sports involvement is at an all-time high. Club sports are so large no one knows quite how large it is. Sports and Fitness Industry Association, also known as SFIA, has conducted a questionnaire and found that there are 21.5 million children between the ages of six and 17 playing team sports outside of school (ESPN). With these sports clubs, countless times the coach tends to be a parent of one of the athletes on the team. Increasingly, many view this as an advantage for the kid whose parent is the coach, however, the majority of the time it is a disadvantage for the child. Due to the parents witnessing first hand how their kid is doing, they tend to be more aggressive and push them harder than they would with others. It is occasionally difficult for coaches to identify psychological distress as a result of spending quality time together. The physical symptoms of psychological distress include difficulty sleeping, change in appetite, trembling, fatigue, or even headaches (NCAA). Psychological distress in athletes is on the rise by the reasons of meeting the standards coaches and their parents’ expect from them. Parents always long for their child to achieve at a greater level than what they were able to accomplish, while they are unknowingly creating psychological distress from verbal aggression, the demand for sports creating athletic burnout and an overbearing parent style.
One way parents are creating psychological distress in their children is through negative commentary. The negative effects are creating low self-esteem and a decrease in academic performance. Children who are subjected to excessive amounts of negative feedback have inferior levels of self-confidence. C. Ruth Solomon did a study on 140 ten-year-olds showcasing how verbal aggression affects their confidence. The result of this study showed that parental vocal aggression is one of the highest contributing factors to athletes having low self-esteem as well as decreased school achievements. A way to help minimize the number of children with low self-esteem is to educate the parents on the topic of positive methods of child nurturing. This study reaffirmed the idea of aggressive verbiage from parents will put strain on the children with low self-esteem and it will lower academic success. The low self-esteem from negative verbiage coordinates with low academic success (Solomon, C. Ruth). The same study also stated that parental verbal aggression at home rather than on the court would create an academic distance, along with low self-esteem parents who do not create a desire for their children to learn. As a result, this creates a lower academic success rate.
Another way parents are creating psychological distress is negative verbiage as well as physical injuries. This is creating an athletic burnout, which is due to excessive athletic training stress joined with too little recovery time. The three factors that create the athletic burnout are the emotional and physical exhaustion, the sense of little to no sports accomplishment, and sports devaluation. These factors are creating a burnout effect on young athletes generating a feeling of low self-worth and not enjoying the sport. The parents, as well as the organization, are creating the psychological stress that comes with the sport by the standards that they are pushing onto the child. With the organization and the individuals, they are creating images that are exhausting and the child will no longer have a desire to become an athlete due to the psychological distress put forth by the coach, parents, and the organization.
Besides, parents are creating psychological distress for their children by being overbearing when it comes to sports. Parents are pressuring their children to win and to be the best when it comes to sports; this is seen all over the United States. This pressure is not helping children in the interest of it is putting a significant deal of unneeded stress from athletics when sports should be enjoyable and rewarding rather than to always win. A famous example of parents creating psychological distress now and in the long run is the story of Mickey Mantle when he played for the New York Yankees from 1951 to 1968. He was the result of overbearing parents in sports. Later in an interview from 1970, he revealed that he wet the bed until he was sixteen and he later developed emotional problems leading to his addiction to alcohol. The pressure his parents put on him was unreal. What parents do not understand is the pressure they are distilling on their children is not helping them now and it will not help them later in life. According to the National Collegiate Athletic Association, approximately three percent of males tend to play college sports and less than point five percent play pro sports. Only three point three percent of females play college sports and roughly point two percent play pro sports. The sole cause of psychological distress in children is parents hoping that their child will earn an athletic scholarship to achieve a descent education (Crouse, Kelsey). As children seek guidance, approval, and comfort from their parents, they are receiving negative criticism. The child may feel as if they are worthless due to them not achieving the goals the parent is setting for them. Also, they may believe they are not able to achieve anything else so why continue to extinguish effort. This will not only produce psychological impairment to the child both now and in the long run, furthermore it will create a barrier between the parent and the child.
After watching the documentary Trophy kids and researching the psychological distress, parents are creating for their children, I believe that the stress parents are putting on their children now will create a psychological distress later in life. As parents project their negative verbiage towards their children they are creating low self-esteem and low academic success. Parents are also creating athletic burnout with the way they are talking to their children when it comes to athletics. As children seek for their parents’ approval, they are overbearing and putting, even more pressures on their children, creating psychological distress that will affect them later in life.