7 Good Reasons to Get Your Child Involved with Sports

Encourage a Healthy Lifestyle

Making exercise a part of your child’s life teaches your child
the importance of fitness. This, along with proper nutrition,
plays a vital role in maintaining health. Children need physical
activity every day and participation in sports helps fill this
need. With today’s wealth of video games and increasing computer
literacy, daily physical activity is often times forgotten.
Getting your child involved with sports helps them make exercise
a part of their lifestyle and increases their chance of a being
a healthier adult.

Promote Self Esteem

When a child realizes that they are getting better and better at
their sport, they can’t help but feel a sense of accomplishment.
Choosing a sport your child can grow and improve in gives your
child an opportunity to build self-esteem. Together, with
positive reinforcement from you their parent, they will gain
confidence and have a more positive view of themselves.

Learn Goal Setting

I’m sure you’ll agree goal setting and success go hand in hand.
Participation in sports gives your child a fun, practical way to
learn about goal setting. They’ll see, experience, and learn
about how goal setting works. If your child’s coach doesn’t
cover goal setting, that’s okay! You as a parent can sit down
with your child and set goals. By assisting your child in
developing this skill, you give them a better chance at
succeeding in life.

Learn and Experience Teamwork

How often have you read a help wanted ad where the employer
wants a “team player” or a candidate that “works well with
others”? I see it all the time. How much more valuable are you
as an employee when you can put differences aside and get the
job done? Sports teach children about teamwork and about how
their actions affect other people. If they can’t learn to work
together with teammates while playing a sport they enjoy, how
will they be able to work with co-workers they may or may not
like while performing a job they may or may not enjoy? This is
an important lesson to learn. Encourage your child to be a team
player and, as a sports parent, keep tabs on whether or not your
words and actions promote this trait in your child.

Develop Time Management Skills

Adding extracurricular activities to your child’s schedule
encourages development of and time management and prioritization
skills. Teach your child that taking care of responsibilities,
such as school work and cleaning up after themselves, comes
first. This gives them their first taste of prioritization.
Next, help your child formulate a plan which enables them to
efficiently handle their responsibilities while still leaving
time for sports practices and competitions. For example, show
your child how working on homework instead of playing outside
during their after-school program helps them finish their
homework in time for practice each day. Then go ahead and make
that part of your plan.

Learn About Dealing with Adversity

Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone has problems. How well you
handle these mistakes and problems directly affects happiness
and quality of life. Many people “get in a slump” and can’t get
out of it. Others continue making the same mistakes over and
over again. In sports, we always try to minimize errors, but
we’re human. Mistakes happen. Even professional athletes make
bad choices and make bad plays, but it’s not the mistake that
counts. What you do from that point forward carries much more
significance. If your child learns how to deal with adversity,
errors, and challenges in sports, chances are, they’ll be able
to translate that skill to real life and effectively minimize
mistakes and/or bad decisions as well as competently recover
from set backs.

Have Fun!

Positive experiences play an essential role in raising a happy,
healthy human being. Sports provide numerous opportunities for
positive experiences both for your child as an individual, and
for your family as a whole. “Sports parents” are blessed with
the chance to watch their child have fun while learning and
developing as an athlete and as a human being.