The Competition Dilemma: It Takes Family Teamwork to Navigate Sports Involvement

Silicon Valley is known for its abundance of adult high-achievers. Many parents have similar high expectations for their children – especially when it comes to sports. Kids are pushed to begin training at an early age and to increase their involvement level quickly. Some children thrive with this kind of encouragement. But for some kids – and their families – the cost in terms of dollars and stress add up. In this article, we look at the question of how and when to push your young athlete and when to back off.

Her new coach stressed the need to spend more time on the ice, and I could see my daughter’s improvement was slow because she wasn’t skating more often. Yet, each time I discussed increasing her number of practice sessions, my daughter balked.

As a parent, I wanted her to scale up her involvement to help her improve – and to justify the cost of lessons. Yet, I couldn’t really afford for her to do so. Nor did I want to push her to do something she was unwilling to do. I didn’t want her to quit because of the pressure to practice more often, yet if she stopped skating altogether it would have made my life, and that of my family, much easier in many ways. My daughter was not an Olympic contender, but I wanted to support her in doing something she enjoyed and to experience being successful at it. I just wasn’t sure how to accomplish that.

Serious Sports
As children outgrow recreational involvement, many parents experience a similar scenario, causing them to wonder how to walk the fine line of their children’s involvement in sports like ice skating, dancing, swimming, tennis and gymnastics, all of which can be time consuming and expensive.