If you have a son or daughter who is a young athlete, you already
know, or will soon know, that you are engaged in one of the most
wonderful experiences of parenthood. Being the parent of a young
and developing athlete can bring unsurpassed joy and excitement. It
also brings significant responsibility. As a youth sport parent you
want your athlete (and hopefully other athletes, as well) to have
the very best of the positive potential that sports can offer. It
is no secret that youth sports can fall short of this promise. They
can be a stressful, negative, or harmful experience if they are
poorly planned, unwisely trained, or are void of positive parental
awareness and involvement. But that is a topic and discussion for
another time, and is addressed elsewhere. The good news is that
such bad news can be avoided. Youth sport is a formative and
experience-filled intense emotional and psychological engagement
for both athletes and parents. In that emotion is much of the
promise and problem, the essence and excess of youth sports'
impact. It is the understanding, training and mastery of the
psychology and emotion of sport that will, to a great degree,
define the quality of the experience for you and your athlete. In
addition to talent and skill, it is the emotional component that
paves the road to excellence in development of performance and
sustained success. This book will help you begin to understand the
concepts and techniques that lead to effective psychological skills
that can maximize motivation, performance and enjoyment of
competition. This is a set of skills that is commonly called
"mental toughness." While there is much more to mental toughness
than can be described here, this book will help you to assess
whether your young athlete's training is providing exposure to and
development in effective and healthy aspects of mental toughness.
It will also help you to promote and reinforce healthy aspects of
mental toughness. We will discuss the vague concept called mental
toughness, why it is needed, why it needs to be trained (and why it
is often not), and how it can be trained. Youth sports are a
complex undertaking - organizationally, financially, socially,
emotionally and psychologically. We will focus on just one aspect,
a crucial one to be sure, but just one aspect of the competitive
youth sports experience. We will assume that other factors in the
foundation for a healthy and successful youth sports experience are
in place. We will assume that as youth sport parents you have
assured, to the best of your ability, that your athlete has access
to a program built on sportsmanship and competent
developmentally-focused coaching. We will assume that as youth
sports parents you value goals such as the unique opportunity to
bond with your young athlete, to fill leisure time with a safe and
productive activity, to develop health and fitness, to train talent
and develop skills, and to promote personal and interpersonal
development, discipline, and respect for effort and achievement in
oneself and others. We will assume that absent are problematic
parental motivations such as over-identification with your athlete
in a vain and ill-fated search for glory, selfish over-investment
in a quest for financial and/or social status returns or parental
competition (not just keeping' up with the Jones, but beating'
them). We will also assume that you want to give your young athlete
every opportunity to maximize his or her potential. By attending to
the psychological and emotional components of competition - mental
toughness - you are giving your athlete the best opportunity to
truly become the complete athlete. Parents, though often maligned
in youth sports, are rarely thanked enough for their efforts and,
indeed, the sacrifices they lovingly make for their young athletes.
Let us thank you right now for caring enough to give your athlete
the full set of equipment to achieve excellence in his or her sport
and life.
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