Parent Resources: 2013

BALANCING ACADEMICS AND ATHLETICS – WHAT YOUR COACH IS REALLY THINKING

Swimmers aren't anointed with time management skills just by getting in a pool. These skills must be learned.

We hear it all day and all night. ‘Swimmers are the best students,’ ‘Swimmers perform academically,’ ‘Swimmers learn time management and life balancing skills.’

As a coach, though, I fear that swimmers have heard these things so often, that they’ve begun presume that it’s a right. Great time management skills just come along when an athlete pays their dues to be on the swim team; that academic success begins the moment a swimmer jumps into the water. There’s somewhat of a sense of entitlement that has begun to form around these ideas, and let me tell you the truth:

THIS IS MAKING YOUR COACH PULL HIS OR HER HAIR OUT.

When you are a young, healthy, able-bodied athlete, in any sport, there are very few good justifications for missing a practice, meet, game, or match. A death in the family, iced-over roads, these are excuses that are acceptable.

The reason, however, that swimming has garnered a reputation for producing the best time managers and the best student-athletes is because we don’t accept a broader range of excuses that might fly elsewhere.

As we are in the midst of final exams in the United States, it is an important time to step back and consider how you got to where you are.

The fact is that academics are a convenient excuse to miss a swim practice. Every student-athlete and every student-athlete’s parents know that all they have to do is tell a coach that “Johnny can’t go to practice, because he needs to study for finals” or “Susie can’t swim today because she needs to be well-rested for her test,” and the coach’s hands are tied. There is little a coach can say in response to the justification of academics over athletics, because in our hearts, we all know that yes: getting an A on a math exam is in fact more important than swim practice, and that a swimmer’s parents, frankly, don’t care what their swim coach has to say on the subject in most cases.

HERE’S WHERE STUDENT-ATHLETES HAVE A CHANCE TO GROW

Everyone in the pool is in agreement that academics always takes priority over athletics. However, if for a young person, these two things are truly the top priorities (this is a matter of philosophy – but there’s a reason why the American educational system has chosen to integrate athletics so heavily into the school system) there are very, very few situations in which an athlete must choose between the two.

The questions that student-athletes need to start asking themselves are how they are truly using their time. If you went on a week-long family vacation over your Thanksgiving holiday, when you knew that your student was struggling with school, you have chosen that family vacation over athletic and academic success.

If you know that you’re going to be out-of-town for much of the winter break, and that you will miss a lot of practices then, and have still chosen to skip practice during finals, then you have chosen your winter break over athletic and academic success.

If you have planned a holiday party prior to the end of the school year, and you have made your child’s attendance at that event mandatory, but their attendance at practice optional, you have chosen that holiday party over your child’s academic and athletic success.

INSTEAD, WE SHOULD BE STARTING EARLY, AND TEACHING YOUR ATHLETE’S STRATEGIES FOR DUAL ATHLETIC AND ACADEMIC SUCCESS

Very rarely does anybody want to learn about time management skills before academics become a problem, and before the big-red-panic button is smashed, meaning that practice attendance goes by the wayside.

Here’s the top strategies I can give to managing these things:

1. Learn what actually works - because it’s probably not what you think. No, all-nighters do not work. No, coming home from school and sitting in front of your text-book does not work. No, saving all of your studying until the night before, or the morning of, a test does not work. No matter how long you’ve been trying these strategies, no matter what anecdotal evidence says, no matter how badly you as a parent or you as a swimmer want to enforce them, study after study after study shows that these are not the best strategies for test performances.

2. Learn from those who know - perhaps the most valuable thing that any swim coach can do, in terms of helping their teams succeed and balance, is to take a practice at the beginning of a season, and bring in a tried-and-true expert to give a seminar on study skills. Strategies like going home and studying the day you first learned something, rather than trying to do it three weeks later before the test. Strategies like taking breaks from studying (practice is a great chance for a mental break from derivatives and gerunds, especially if the coach is trying to work harmoniously and is giving credit to the fact that finals can be a stressful time for swimmers) can be a big win, and too many people assume they know the best way to study and learn without taking the time to read the literature.

3. Talk to your coaches before deciding - you will be amazed on what coaches are willing to do to keep kids in the water. Late arrival, let the swimmer get out 30 minutes early, letting a teammate who is excelling in that class get out 30 minutes early to help tutor them or help them work through a problem, coaching them on time management, helping to keep them focused. The problem is that too often, the coach isn’t brought into the loop until a student is at the breaking point or in the danger zone. In the United States, athletic coaches, along with teachers, peers, and parents, are a part of a child’s support system, and the fact is that because of the nature of what we do, coaches will often have a very different connection with students than any of those other groups. Coaches are able to give students a ‘higher purpose’ for their studying, coaches are able to connect with students on a different level, students are used to receiving constructive criticism from their coaches, and students are used to their coaches holding them to high standards. Therefore, a coach reminding a student to study and how to study can sometimes have a bigger impact than any of the other groups.

4. Understand your circumstances - Every sport has a different circumstance, and it’s important to know those circumstances when planning your life. If your child’s taper meet is in mid-December, then maybe your family tradition becomes grandma travels to you for Thanksgiving, and you travel to grandma for Christmas. If your high school season runs through February, make your big family vacation over spring break rather than winter break. Even different sports have different challenges and opportunities. Football players don’t take Thanksgiving vacations, and so swimmers shouldn’t take big vacations in the middle of their primary season.

5. Respect your coaches, and they’ll return the same - If you have enough respect to get your coach’s input on your child’s specific situation, then they will have the respect to be flexible and understanding about your child’s practice attendance. When your coach really gets angry is when you come to them with a final decision before said coach has had any chance to proactively impact the situation. Coaches like to be in control, and often times, they are quite good at it. Give them a chance. Make it a conversation. The coach shouldn’t dictate to the athlete or the parent, nor should vice versa happen, but there is usually a positive solution to a problem.

6. Hold yourself to a higher standard - as mentioned above, “school over sports” is an easy excuse to get sympathy for your decision to shirk responsibilities to athletics. Your parents will let you get away with it, your teachers will let you get away with it, and even your teammates might let you get away with it. To truly get everything out of the student-athlete experience, however, it is up to the students to hold themselves to a higher standard than that. It’s up to the students to hold themselves to both their academic and athletic commitments. And it’s up to the students to balance their lives.

Reposted from swimswam.com

The Missing Ingredient

By John O’Sullivan of www.changingthegameproject.com

If you have coached long enough, you have probably said this about a player:

“He’s got a lot of talent, but he is just missing something.”

I have written on similar subjects in the past, and there has been academic research in this area. In all likelihood, that missing ingredient was often the inner drive and will to succeed, a burning desire to push on despite obstacles and challenges. Well, now we have an academic term to describe all of this.

In 2005, Dr Angela Duckworth, a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania, began studying self discipline. She measured 164 middle school students through both IQ and self discipline assessments, and then tracked their progress over a year of school. She found that the students’ self-discipline scores were better predictors of GPA than IQ scores. This self-discipline, combined with a passionate commitment to a task and a burning desire to see it through, she termed GRIT.

Duckworth then developed a 12 question test, which she termed the Grit Scale (click here for link to the test) that takes only a few minutes to complete, but has been shown to be an incredibly good predictor of success. From the National Spelling Bee, to college campuses, Duckworth and her colleagues found that their Grit scores were strong indicators of higher GPAs and better performance.

In their most remarkable finding, Duckworth and her team administered their test to an incoming class at the United States Military Academy at West Point. There, cadets already undergo a complex evaluation of academic grades, physical fitness measurements, and leadership testing, administered by the Army to predict which cadets will survive the rigors of West Point. In the end, Duckworth’s twelve-question Grit Test was a more accurate predictor of who would stay in school!

Now I certainly do not think that Grit is the single determinant of success or achievement. As I have stated many times, performance is made up of a variety of factors, such as talent, coaching, deliberate practice, luck, and motivation to name a few. Yet when I think of all the talented players I coached who did not make it, the missing ingredient was often very close to Duckworth’s description of Grit: “the tendency to sustain interest in and effort toward very long-term goals.” They had talent, they worked hard, but they did not maintain their interest and effort long enough to become elite competitors.

On the other hand, I coached many players who displayed less competence at younger ages, yet often turned out to be the top players in their late teenage years. When I think about this, I truly believe that many of these athletes were forced to develop grit, for nothing came easy for them. They were often younger, smaller, slower, and received fewer accolades than many of their teammates. They possessed many limiting factors, experienced more disappointment, and had to fight much harder for playing time than some of their teammates. Many were not even selected to the all important “A” team in middle school. Yet the more obstacles they faced and overcame, the more grit they developed. Then one day, they grew, and all of a sudden they were equally fast, strong, and skillful. Yet they possessed an additional quality that their teammates did not develop: GRIT!

Any athlete that strives to play in college, or professionally, will face numerous obstacles that talent will not overcome. The world of professional sports is littered with extremely talented individuals who did not have the fortitude to fight for a spot, maintain their fitness and discipline, and continue to work hard and improve. I think of Freddy Adu, the young American soccer prodigy who signed pro at 14, and was recently released from his tenth pro club at age 25. I read a recent story how, in preparation for the 2010 World Cup, Adu came in dead last in a 20 minute training run, behind even the coaching staff. He was not selected for the team, and his career has continued in a downward spiral since. Why? Because he had the world handed to him at age 14, and he never developed the grit it took to continue to improve.

My advice is this: if your child is young and struggling to succeed in a sport, help them develop the grit to persevere, and the love of the sport to stick with it. Find them a team that allows them to play, and have fun. With these things, if they have the talent, they will likely enjoy a successful athletic career.

If you are a parent of a pre-pubescent all-star, do you child a favor and make sure that early success does not prevent them from developing grit. If they are the best in their age, take them to play against older kids where their athletic advantages no longer exist. Put them on a team that does not win all its games so they learn to deal with disappointment. Don’t overlook poor effort and focus -especially when they win – because one day only their very best will yield results. Above all else, remember that if your child does not develop grit, the likelihood of high-level high school, college and professional athletics are quite slim.

Here is Dr. Angela Duckworth’s recent TED talk on Grit. It is only six minutes and worth a watch. Then, below, please share your thoughts on the role of grit in developing elite athletes. Can you instill it? Are you born with it? Is it equally important as talent and coaching? I would love to hear your thoughts and ideas.

More Important Than Talent

Parents ask me all the time if I think their child has what it takes to play at the college or professional level. They are asking if I think their kid has enough talent. My reply:

“How much are your kids willing to suffer?”

The answer to that simple question will go a long way in determining whether any athlete will reach his potential, and perhaps play at an elite level. Sorry to burst many bubbles, but if athletes are not willing to suffer, chances are slim that they will make it. The will to suffer and endure not only separates average athletes from elite ones, but it separates talented elite athletes from their peers as well.

(I recorded a short video on this as well, added December 1)

More Important Than Talent

Now I know that genetics, deliberate training, coaching, and a whole slew of things go into the development of athletes. To place all your emphasis on any one factor is ill advised, and very narrow minded. Some people do this with the so-called “10,000 Hour Rule” of deliberate practice, while others believe that you either have talent or you do not.

I am in the business of training elite soccer players. I have been doing this for nearly 20 years. I have learned that no one factor takes an athlete to the next level. A combination of factors do, and for me, an athlete’s willingness to suffer, his or her comfort with being uncomfortable, is often a strong determinant upon whether they reach their potential, or instead become another one of those “shoulda, coulda, woulda” players.

The current mythology of overnight success, where we are lead to believe every success story was born with the talent, has blinded us to the fact that the elite athletes we see on television have all suffered. They have practiced and toiled for long hours, day after day, when no one was watching. Time and again, when they wanted to quit, they did one more repetition, ran one more lap, and trained a few minutes longer. They gave up time with friends and family to pursue their craft. They make it look easy because of the thousands of hours that they made it hard on themselves. They willingly made themselves uncomfortable! They suffered because they knew that they had to in order to succeed.

Most of the athletes I work with will not ever achieve their true potential, because the thought of suffering and discomfort frightens them. Some just do not like being out of their comfort zone. Others have a fixed mindset, and are afraid that if the give their best and come up short they are some kind of failure (which of course they are not), so they never try.

Far too many have been coddled by their parents and protected from failure. Others have had coaches who let them give less than their best because they were a 12 year old star. When a coach got tough, these players were used to backing off. When they encountered adversity, their parents stepped in and intervened, instead of using it as a teachable moment. When given the choice of whether to embrace suffering, or pull back, these athletes often chose the easy path. That is why they will not make it.

Anson Dorrance is the women’s soccer coach of the twenty-two time National Champion University of North Carolina. He once encountered Mia Hamm, the reigning college player of the year, and already one of the top players in the world, training by herself early one morning on a hot, humid summer day. As he watched, she pushed herself through sprint after sprint, falling to the ground and gasping for breath after each. He wrote the following message to her:

“The true vision of a champion is someone bent over, drenched in sweat, at the point of exhaustion, when no one else is watching.”

Mia Hamm went on to become the best player in the world, not only because she had talent and great coaching, but because she was willing to suffer more than her competitors.

Are you instilling a willingness to suffer in your athletes? In your kids? Are you challenging them, making them uncomfortable, pushing them hard, and then pushing a little harder?

Are your kids willing to suffer?

If they are not, they can still do a lot of things in life, but becoming an elite athlete is probably not one of them.

Help them build the will to suffer, to endure in the face of great obstacles, and the ability to cherish the opportunity to struggle, and chances are far greater that they will reach their potential in whatever field they choose!

Suffering is the elite athlete’s best friend!

Written by John O’Sullivan founder of the Changing the Game Project. http://changingthegameproject.com/staff-bios/

Original post can be found here http://changingthegameproject.com/more-important-than-talent/

Empowering and Educating Parents Will Fix the Youth Sports Mess

By John O’Sullivan of http://changingthegameproject.com/

When I was a child, my father used to jokingly tell my siblings and I that he was convinced we had another brother whom he had never seen, but was quite the trouble maker. This brother, named "Not Me," seemed to be responsible for every broken, dirty, and disheveled thing around the house. Who broke the railing on the porch: "Not me," I would say. Who left the dishes in the sink: "Not me," said my brother. Who finished the ice cream: "Not me," the three of us would cry in unison. Try as my father did, he was never able to discover the identity of the mysterious troublemaker, "Not Me," who tormented him throughout our youth.

Youth sports has its own "Not me," an entity that is seemingly to blame for every ailment that afflicts our children's sporting lives: the parents! Ask any coach or athletic administrator these days what the biggest challenge he or she faces when it comes to developing young athletes, and almost unequivocally, you will be told "the parents." Parents who don't see the big picture, parents who think Johnny is better then Tommy, parents who think their son should be the star forward, or is in line for a full scholarship, parents who coach from the sidelines; you name it, parents are blamed for every ill in youth sports today.

Youth athletics is now a negative, damaging environment that is causing 70% of children to quit organized sports by the age of 13, and many coaches and administrators believe that if we just got rid of the parents, all our problems would go away. Unfortunately, they could not be more wrong. While parents may be at the root of many of our problems, they also lie at the heart of our solution! Its time to stop blaming parents, and start enlisting their help to shift the paradigm, and give youth sports back to our kids!

There is no greater influence in the life of a young athlete than his or her parents. Coaches only spend a fraction of the time with their players that the parents do. Why not put this parent-child time to use? Why not educate our parents about ways to help their athletes, instead of demanding that they stay out of it? Why not make them our advocates, instead of our adversaries?

Throughout two decades of coaching, I have seen every type of Parental Code of Conduct known to man handed to parents to sign, and they all have one thing in common: none of them work UNLESS those who sign them are held accountable. In my experience, this is rarely done, and thus the rules go right out the window. I believe it is time to stop handing parents rules, and start giving them ways to help their kids, and standards to aspire to that will benefit their child's development, as an athlete and as a person.

Parents, you are the solution to what ails us! You will be the solution when you decide what you value most, and ensure that your child's sports experience is delivering those values. You will be the solution when you demand that sport serves our children first, and our parents and coaches second.

Right now the vocal minority of parents is demanding early single sport specialization, a pre-pubescent focus on winning, and unfettered sideline access to their child so they may coach them from the first whistle to the last. Pushing our kids to our goals instead of theirs, emphasizing winning over development, early sport specialization, and sideline coaching have all been shown by both scientific and psychological research to be damaging to a child's performance, but because parents demand it, they are able to find coaches and clubs willing to provide that service.

Now if you are reading this, and you are a parent who is thinking "that is not me, that is not what I do!" then congratulations, but what are you doing about it? Are you enlisting other parents who feel the same way you do, in order to change the environment on your team and in your club? Or do you feel powerless to stem the tide of this environment that will likely cause your child to quit sports, and thus saying nothing at all?

You are NOT powerless. You are the silent majority. There are far more parents who are thinking what you are thinking than you can imagine. At every talk I have ever done, parents tell me that their gut says the path they are on is wrong, but the need to "keep up with the Joneses" and the fear that they are short changing their child if they do not keep up is so strong that they just do what everyone else is doing. This damaging group think, based NOT on the best science but on excellent marketing from businesses that capitalize upon it, has created a generation of disillusioned athletes. It causes children to quit sports. It destroys parent's relationships with their kids. And it is far less likely to help your child perform his best then exposing him to a wide variety of opportunities, and helping him find his own passion.

There are millions of parents out there who are capable of taking back youth sports from the few who believe that emphasizing winning over love of the game, and trophies over developing better people, is the path to success. All the science backs that feeling in your gut that the current path is not the right one. We just need to do a better job getting the word out.

If everyone's kids were smoking cigarettes, would you accept that your kid was going to be a smoker, in spite of all the evidence that shows how damaging it is? Would you buy her cigarettes for her? Of course not. You would tell her that just because everyone is doing it does not make it right. You would fight for her health, even when everyone else had given up the fight not because it's easy, and regardless of the support of other parents, because YOU know that it is not healthy for YOUR Child.

Well, I hate to say it, but right now your young athlete is surrounded by metaphorical smokers, and it is up to YOU to take a stand for what you value. YOU need to sound out the parents who feel the same as you do, but are too caught up in the cloud of smoke to see the light. At first you will be an outlier, and perhaps called a trouble maker. But take heart in the words of Gandhi:

"At first they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win."

It is time for youth sports to serve our kids again. It is time for sports to promote positive values for them. It is time for those of us who have read the science and know that the status quo is wrong to make our voices heard. It is time to stop saying "Not me" and start saying "Why not me?" Change your child, change your team, change your community, and together we will change the world of youth sports.

If you think more parents need to hear this message, then please share it with them.

What Teachers Really Want To Tell Parents

By Ron Clark, Special to CNN

Editor's note: Ron Clark, author of "The End of Molasses Classes: Getting Our Kids Unstuck -- 101 Extraordinary Solutions for Parents and Teachers," has been named "American Teacher of the Year" by Disney and was Oprah Winfrey's pick as her "Phenomenal Man." He founded The Ron Clark Academy, which educators from around the world have visited to learn. This article's massive social media response inspired CNN to follow up with Facebook users. Some of the best comments were featured in a gallery.

(CNN) -- This summer, I met a principal who was recently named as the administrator of the year in her state. She was loved and adored by all, but she told me she was leaving the profession.

I screamed, "You can't leave us," and she quite bluntly replied, "Look, if I get an offer to lead a school system of orphans, I will be all over it, but I just can't deal with parents anymore; they are killing us."

Unfortunately, this sentiment seems to be becoming more and more prevalent. Today, new teachers remain in our profession an average of just 4.5 years, and many of them list "issues with parents" as one of their reasons for throwing in the towel. Word is spreading, and the more negativity teachers receive from parents, the harder it becomes to recruit the best and the brightest out of colleges.

So, what can we do to stem the tide? What do teachers really need parents to understand?

10 things parents and teachers want each other to know

For starters, we are educators, not nannies. We are educated professionals who work with kids every day and often see your child in a different light than you do. If we give you advice, don't fight it. Take it, and digest it in the same way you would consider advice from a doctor or lawyer. I have become used to some parents who just don't want to hear anything negative about their child, but sometimes if you're willing to take early warning advice to heart, it can help you head off an issue that could become much greater in the future.

Trust us. At times when I tell parents that their child has been a behavior problem, I can almost see the hairs rise on their backs. They are ready to fight and defend their child, and it is exhausting. One of my biggest pet peeves is when I tell a mom something her son did and she turns, looks at him and asks, "Is that true?" Well, of course it's true. I just told you. And please don't ask whether a classmate can confirm what happened or whether another teacher might have been present. It only demeans teachers and weakens the partnership between teacher and parent.

Please quit with all the excuses

The truth is, a lot of times it's the bad teachers who give the easiest grades, because they know by giving good grades everyone will leave them alone.
Ron Clark

And if you really want to help your children be successful, stop making excuses for them. I was talking with a parent and her son about his summer reading assignments. He told me he hadn't started, and I let him know I was extremely disappointed because school starts in two weeks.

His mother chimed in and told me that it had been a horrible summer for them because of family issues they'd been through in July. I said I was so sorry, but I couldn't help but point out that the assignments were given in May. She quickly added that she was allowing her child some "fun time" during the summer before getting back to work in July and that it wasn't his fault the work wasn't complete.

Can you feel my pain?

Some parents will make excuses regardless of the situation, and they are raising children who will grow into adults who turn toward excuses and do not create a strong work ethic. If you don't want your child to end up 25 and jobless, sitting on your couch eating potato chips, then stop making excuses for why they aren't succeeding. Instead, focus on finding solutions.

Teachers vs. parents: Round two

Parents, be a partner instead of a prosecutor

And parents, you know, it's OK for your child to get in trouble sometimes. It builds character and teaches life lessons. As teachers, we are vexed by those parents who stand in the way of those lessons; we call them helicopter parents because they want to swoop in and save their child every time something goes wrong. If we give a child a 79 on a project, then that is what the child deserves. Don't set up a time to meet with me to negotiate extra credit for an 80. It's a 79, regardless of whether you think it should be a B+.

This one may be hard to accept, but you shouldn't assume that because your child makes straight A's that he/she is getting a good education. The truth is, a lot of times it's the bad teachers who give the easiest grades, because they know by giving good grades everyone will leave them alone. Parents will say, "My child has a great teacher! He made all A's this year!"

Wow. Come on now. In all honesty, it's usually the best teachers who are giving the lowest grades, because they are raising expectations. Yet, when your children receive low scores you want to complain and head to the principal's office.

Please, take a step back and get a good look at the landscape. Before you challenge those low grades you feel the teacher has "given" your child, you might need to realize your child "earned" those grades and that the teacher you are complaining about is actually the one that is providing the best education.

And please, be a partner instead of a prosecutor. I had a child cheat on a test, and his parents threatened to call a lawyer because I was labeling him a criminal. I know that sounds crazy, but principals all across the country are telling me that more and more lawyers are accompanying parents for school meetings dealing with their children.

Teachers walking on eggshells

I feel so sorry for administrators and teachers these days whose hands are completely tied. In many ways, we live in fear of what will happen next. We walk on eggshells in a watered-down education system where teachers lack the courage to be honest and speak their minds. If they make a slight mistake, it can become a major disaster.

My mom just told me a child at a local school wrote on his face with a permanent marker. The teacher tried to get it off with a wash cloth, and it left a red mark on the side of his face. The parent called the media, and the teacher lost her job. My mom, my very own mother, said, "Can you believe that woman did that?"

I felt hit in the gut. I honestly would have probably tried to get the mark off as well. To think that we might lose our jobs over something so minor is scary. Why would anyone want to enter our profession? If our teachers continue to feel threatened and scared, you will rob our schools of our best and handcuff our efforts to recruit tomorrow's outstanding educators.

Finally, deal with negative situations in a professional manner.

If your child said something happened in the classroom that concerns you, ask to meet with the teacher and approach the situation by saying, "I wanted to let you know something my child said took place in your class, because I know that children can exaggerate and that there are always two sides to every story. I was hoping you could shed some light for me." If you aren't happy with the result, then take your concerns to the principal, but above all else, never talk negatively about a teacher in front of your child. If he knows you don't respect her, he won't either, and that will lead to a whole host of new problems.

We know you love your children. We love them, too. We just ask -- and beg of you -- to trust us, support us and work with the system, not against it. We need you to have our backs, and we need you to give us the respect we deserve. Lift us up and make us feel appreciated, and we will work even harder to give your child the best education possible.

That's a teacher's promise, from me to you.

Reposted from www.cnn.com

5 Tips for Mental Toughness

By John O’Sullivan author of Changing the Game

Are your kids mentally tough? Can they be pushed to achieve great things, or do they need to be coddled? Do they deal well with disappointment and failure, or do they fear it, and thus avoid challenging situations? Do they fear strict, demanding coaches, or do they thrive on them? As parents we know our kids need to be mentally tough if they are going to make it in the real world. Sports is a great way to give them the tools of the trade. Here are 5 Tips for increasing your kids’ mental toughness.

1. STRUGGLE IS GOOD!

If you want your children to grow up mentally strong, then they need to struggle, they HAVE to struggle! We don’t remember our easy teachers or coaches, we remember our tough ones. Are some of them over the top…of course, and we do not need to accept behavior from adult mentors that berates our children for their ability. When you go to the gym, do you go with friends, or a personal trainer that say “its ok, skip that last set” or do you go with the ones who say “Do it again, do it better, you can do more?” Likely, its the latter.

Surround your kids with coaches and teachers that give honest, and sometimes painful feedback, and you will develop mentally tough kids who perform at a high level as well.

2. LET THEM FAIL

There is a myth out there that says if our kids fail, their self esteem and confidence will suffer. This is not true, especially if we help to frame the failure for our kids.

Researchers have shown that if we explain that failure is part of the learning process, and is actually a necessary component of achievement, then their self esteem is not effected. In fact, if the necessity to fail is explained properly, on subsequent tests children often out-perform their peers who are not told that is is OK to struggle and come up short. So explain the need to fail, and create an environment where your kids do not fear failure and you will see better performance from your kids in the long run.

3. PRAISE EFFORT

We have talked about this before, but I cannot reiterate enough that praising your child’s ability (you are so smart, you are so artistic, you are such a great player) actually can be damaging to their mindset, and ultimately to their performance. You want a mentally tough kid who performs up to his or her potential? Then praise their effort, highlight the work they are putting into their sport, the extra hours of training, their added effort in training, etc. This is what will help your kids grow tough, confident, and strong. Effort is always the key to ultimate success.

4. STRICT IS A GOOD THING

Being a strict coach, or having strict coaches and teachers for your kids, is actually a good thing. Studies show that not only do children perform better with strict coaches/teachers, but that eventually they realize (sometimes years later) the benefits of having a leader who told them to do it again, do it better, is this your best effort, etc. Is your child doing better in math than in English? Chances are the math teacher is demanding more! Surround your kids with people who demand their best effort all the time. They will grow tougher, and they will appreciate it in the long run.

5. STRESS IS GOOD

Research shows that children who encounter a moderate amount of stress as they grow up actually develop resilience to stressful situations in the future. Since we cannot protect our children from difficult, stressful situations throughout their lives, why not teach them how to deal with them when they are young? Something as simple as having a difficult teacher or coach will help your kids develop the resilience necessary to live in the real world, and, when difficult situations arise in sports, perform at a high level when others around them crumble!

Good luck instilling some mental toughness in your kids! The process is not always easy, and can even be emotionally painful for you and them, as they struggle in stressful, difficult environments. Just remember that you are building a sturdy foundation for your kids, one to last a lifetime. I am quite certain that a foundation built upon mental strength and fortitude will serve them well!

Posted from changingthegameproject.com

Help Your Child Survive, and Thrive with a Coach

Growing Champions for Life has provided us with a link to the recorded webinar!

Help Your Child Survive, and Thrive with a Coach - Recordinggrowingchampions.webex.com26

Join us as we expose the best-kept secrets of how athletes and parents can adapt to the four primary styles of coaches. Is your coach a Rhino, Peacock, Retriever, or Owl? These connecting skills work in every arena of life!

Learn how to identify the four styles of coaches;
Discover the factors within your child’s control that impact a coach;
Give your child positive strategies for adapting to the behavioral preferences of his or her coach without a personality change.

http://growingchampionsforlife.com/

A Few Suggestions on HOW TO BE A BETTER SWIMMING PARENT–Part 6 of 6

Adapted from an article written By Michael Brooks, Head Coach, York YMCA Swimming

NOTA BENE

WE all want what is best for the child. That is sometimes hard for coaches to understand. That is also sometimes hard for parents to understand. Much of the historical tension between coaches and parents can be avoided if we agree on two golden rules: first, let’s cut each other some slack and not jump on and over-react to the first unsubstantiated third-hand rumor that comes down the pike. And second, let’s communicate, often, and not just when we may have a problem.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

SWIMMING is a mystery. Most of the time only God really knows why a swimmer did so well or so poorly. Coaches can point to the easy answers, superficial indices (stroke count, stroke rate, splits, etc.), which are probably more often effects than they are causes. Who can explain why a swimmer whose workouts have been horrid and who hasn’t gotten much sleep, will come alive at a meet and set the water on fire? Why a swimmer whose workouts have been wonderful and who has been doing everything right, will come to a meet and look like death warmed over? Or why a swimmer who has been a rock for years will come mentally unglued at the big meet? Sometimes hard work isn’t rewarded with good performances. Sometimes lazing around and skipping practices is. This is hard for coaches, swimmers, and parents to accept. Not everything in life makes sense, and not everything in life is fair. It doesn’t take a reflective coach very long to figure out that he isn’t in total control here. Ponder the Greek tragedies.

A work in progress. These recommendations/suggestions may sound set in stone. But my thinking on most of these subjects is evolving, since these subjects are complicated and since kids are, too. These are topics that we should all consider as open to discussion. Being a good coach is just as difficult as being a good parent, and it involves thinking through and judging correctly about the same issues. Most parents are confused at least part of the time about whether or not they are doing the right things with their kids. And most coaches are equally uncertain about whether the methods that worked for one swimmer will work with another.

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 – Part 5

A Few Suggestions on HOW TO BE A BETTER SWIMMING PARENT–Part 5 of 6

Adapted from an article written By Michael Brooks, Head Coach, York YMCA Swimming

NOTA BENE

PROBLEMS, POTENTIAL AND KINETIC

UNEQUAL Justice for all? Sometimes parents ask, “Why don’t you treat the kids equally, with one standard for all?” For the same reason that most parents don’t treat their own children exactly the same: because kids have different capabilities, personalities, and motivations, and what works for one child doesn’t work for all. Second, because with talent comes responsibility. When a very fast swimmer, whom the others look up to and follow, messes around in practice, he drags the whole group down with him. This will not be tolerated. Higher expectations accompanying talent should be taken as a compliment.

THE wisdom of Solomon. Coaches make many decisions. You won’t agree with them all. For instance, relays. As a general rule, every parent thinks his child should be on the “A” relay. But only four swimmers can be on the relay team. The coaches will choose the four kids whom they think will do the best job today. That is not always the four with the top four “best times.” Sometimes it includes a swimmer who has been very impressive in practices, or someone who is on fire at this meet, or someone who hasn’t swum the event in a meet in a while and so hasn’t officially made a fast time but who has let the coaches know by practice performance and otherwise that he deserves to be in the relay. Trust the coaches to act in what they consider the best interests of the team as a whole, and understand that this sometimes conflicts with what you see as the best interests of your child at this moment.

MEDDLING isn’t coaching. A lot of coaches, especially younger ones, will “overcoach” as a rule, especially at meets. “Overcoaches” are in the kids’ faces all the time, giving them twenty thousand instructions before they race, timing them incessantly during the warm-ups of a championship meet, controlling every little thing. Many parents are impressed by this show of active coaching. However, overcoaching is destructive, at practice and at meets. At practice, swimmers need instruction -- that is agreed. But they also need to be allowed to try things, to find out what works and what doesn’t, to watch other swimmers, with perhaps a few leading questions from the coach. You don’t teach an infant how to walk; he watches you, he tries it, he falls, he falls again and again, and in no time he is charging around the house making mischief.

And when you get to a meet, the general rule should be, the less said the better. In a stressful environment, the more information you try to force into a kid’s head at the last minute, the more likely you are to jam his circuits entirely (similar to “cramming” for an exam in school). He will head to the blocks not knowing which way is up. If a coach has been doing the job in practice, the swimmer will know how to swim his race before he gets to the meet. A couple of cues or reminders, and only a couple, and the swimmer can hop on the blocks without his mind cluttered by overcoaching.

TALK to the coach. Communicate your concerns about the program or your child’s progress within it with the coach, not with your child. Never complain about a coach to a child. The last thing a ten year-old needs is to be caught in the middle between two adult authority figures. Further, when you have a problem or concern, please do not head to other parents to complain, head to the coach to discuss. There is nothing guaranteed to destroy a program faster, and to send good (even great) coaches running for the door quicker, than a group of parents sitting together every day in the stands comparing notes about the things they don’t like.

SEMPER fidelis. Don’t criticize the team to outsiders, don’t criticize the coach to outsiders, don’t criticize other parents to outsiders, don’t criticize your own swimmers to outsiders, don’t criticize others’ swimmers to outsiders. If you can’t find anything good to say, don’t say anything at all.

LEAVE this campsite cleaner than you found it. Before you complain about any component of the program, ask yourself: what am I doing, positively and actively, to help the team function better?

DON’T try to be a swimming expert. With the internet rage, the amount of really bad information available at the click of a mouse is overwhelming. And not being a coach, not being immersed in the sport twenty-four hours a day, not having much historical perspective on technique and training, and generally not knowing where the website you just stumbled onto fits in the jigsaw puzzle of the sport, you are in no position to judge what you find critically.

THERE are no “age group parents” and “senior parents.” There are only swimming parents. Once a portion of the team’s parents begins to think of itself as having a different interest from that of the group as a whole, the team has begun to rip itself apart. The rose bud is not distinct from the rose in full flowering; they are the same things at different stages of development, with identical interests.

KEEP me in the loop. It happens quite frequently that I cannot understand why a swimmer is responding to the training as he is. It seems to make no sense, if we assume that the only variables are the ones that I am in control of in training. Why is he so tired? Why is he so inconsistent? It is easy to forget that everything happening in the swimmer’s life during the twenty-one hours a day when he is away from the pool affects his swimming as much or more than the three hours of training when I am ostensibly in charge. Let me know if there are problems at home or at school that will affect your swimmer’s training and racing performance. You don’t need to give me all the details, but in order to coach your swimmer individually; I have to know what is happening individually.

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 – Part 6

A Few Suggestions on HOW TO BE A BETTER SWIMMING PARENT–Part 4 of 6

Adapted from an article written By Michael Brooks, Head Coach, York YMCA Swimming

NOTA BENE

SUPPORT, NOT PRESSURE

THE Rock of Gibraltar. As they succeed then fail then succeed again, kids will ride emotional roller-coasters. One of your most important functions as a swimming parent is to provide emotional support during the tough times, of which there will be many. Let them know that they are still loved, no matter how poorly they think they swam. And don’t let them get cocky when they win.

DON’T coach your kids. If the swimmer is hearing one story from his coach and another from his parent, we have one confused swimmer. A swimmer must have trust in his coach and in the program, and he will not if his parents are implicitly telling him that they know best. If you have concerns about the coaching or the coaching advice, talk to the coach directly. If in the end you feel that you cannot support the coach or the program, your best course is to find a team whose coach you trust. Your swimmer has a coach; she needs you to be a parent.

THE next Missy Franklin?? No matter how good your swimmer seems to be as a ten year old, don’t get your hopes too high. Don’t expect an Olympian (you are allowed to hope for an Olympian), and don’t judge his every move (or swim) by Olympian standards. In order to make it to the Olympics so many things over such a comparatively long time have to go right, so many decisions have to be made “correctly” (and can only be seen to be correct with hindsight), and so much plain good luck is required, that the odds are heavy against it. Further, many kids are physically talented, but few have the mental talent: the poise, drive, and persistence to develop the gifts they are given. How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice. As psychologist Howard Gruber, who has made a life-work out of studying great achievers, has argued, the difference between the very good and the truly great isn’t talent but much harder and consistent work.

IN praise of famous kids? Don’t puff up a 10-year old, or we will end up with a monster on our hands. Don’t get too impressed, don’t praise too highly – leave room for when they get a lot better. No matter how fast a child swims, it is still a child swimming, and the level of accomplishment is very low compared to how high she will reach five or ten years from now. Don’t treat him like a superstar, because the more you treat him like a superstar, the less likely he will become one. Pampered kids aren’t tough.

Similarly, be careful not to brag about your swimmer to other parents. No one likes to hear continuous talk about someone else’s kid, and if your swimmer is really good, it will be apparent to everyone without your having to tell them. Dale Carnegie said, “Talk about them, not about me.” Translate this into: “Talk about their swimmer, not about mine.”

EVERY Soviet victory a victory for Soviet socialist ideology? How your child swam in the 50 fly ten minutes ago is no reflection of your value as a person or as a parent. A first place ribbon does not validate your parenting techniques, or the quality of your genes. Alternately, a slow swim should not bring into question a family’s commitment, financial and otherwise, to a child’s swimming. Swimming is hard enough for a child without having to carry around her parents’ self-esteem on her shoulders when she races. Also remember that what goes around comes around. The better you allow yourself to feel about a victory now, the worse a loss will feel next meet, or the next event.

JEKYLL and Hyde. Coaches often undergo miraculous transformations. It is always interesting to watch parents’ changing attitudes and behavior towards the coach when their children are “succeeding” or “failing.” When the child swims well, the coach is a good chap and everyone’s happy. When the child bombs, the coach is an Untouchable who should not be looked in the eye. Sometimes this change occurs in the space of half an hour. Precious few parents treat me the same no matter how their children perform.

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 5 – Part 6

A Few Suggestions on HOW TO BE A BETTER SWIMMING PARENT–Part 3 of 6

Adapted from an article written By Michael Brooks, Head Coach, York YMCA Swimming

NOTA BENE

HOW KIDS WORK

KIDS are inconsistent. There is nothing that any coach or parent can do to change that. A ten-year old swimmer who knows better will in the pressure of a meet do a flip-turn on breaststroke. Another young swimmer will take twenty seconds off her best time in a race this week, and next week add it all back, with interest. One week it will seem that the butterfly is mastered, and the next week that we’ve never even been introduced to the stroke. A senior swimmer will take ten seconds off her best time one race, then an hour later add ten seconds in her next race. It’s enough to make your hair turn grey. Learn to expect it and even to enjoy it.

SO you thought she was a backstroker. Age groupers change favorite or “best” strokes approximately every other day. A stroke will “click” suddenly, and then later just as suddenly un-click. There is no explanation for this phenomenon. A stroke the child hated becomes her favorite by virtue of her having done well at yesterday’s meet. These are good arguments for having kids swim all four strokes in practice and meets, and for not allowing early specialization.

NO cookie-cutter swimmers. Kids learn at different rates and in different ways.

One swimmer picks up the breaststroke kick in a day; it takes another swimmer a year to master the same skill. If you pay close attention, you could probably write a treatise on motor learning after watching just one practice of novice swimmers. Be careful of comparing your swimmer to others, and especially be careful of comparing your swimmer to others in her hearing. Never never never measure the continuing success of your child by his performance against a particular competitor, who is likely to be on a completely different biological timetable from your child. Doing so makes you either despondent or arrogant.

WHY doesn’t he look like Michael Phelps? Little kids are not strong enough or coordinated enough for their strokes to look like the senior swimmers, no matter how many drills they do or how many repeats. And parents shouldn’t stress about a little thing that a swimmer struggles with for a time, such as a proper breaststroke kick. Kids seem to get these things when they are ready, and not until. We are winning the game if they steadily improve their motor control, steadily improve their aerobic conditioning, and steadily improve their attitudes. They will look like Michael soon enough.

HOW they do versus what they do. Especially at younger ages, how fast a child swims and how well he places in a meet have little significance for how that swimmer will do as a senior. Many national caliber athletes were not at all noteworthy as ten year olds. Competition times and places often tell you not about the amount of swimming talent a child has, but about how early a developer he is. What is truly important in determining future swimming success is what happens everyday in practice: Is he developing skills and technique? Is he internalizing the attitudes of a champion? Is he gradually building an aerobic base and building for the future? The work done is cumulative, with every practice adding a grain of sand to what will eventually become a mountain.

TIMES are the least of our worries. Many young swimmers spaz out when they swim, especially at meets when they race. But you learn technique and control best at slow speeds. Don’t rush, take it slow, and get it perfect before you try to go fast. Even in meets, for the little ones I am much more interested in how they get down the pool than in how fast they do. Technique and tactics are more important than the numbers on the watch; if the technique and tactics are improving steadily, the time on the watch will improve steadily, too, and without our obsessing over it.

BUT he swam faster in practice!?!? Younger kids are routinely swimming as fast in practice as they do in meets. From one perspective, this makes no sense. Why should a swimmer do better on the last repeat of 10 x 400 on short rest, after having swum 3600 meters at descending pace, than she does when all she has to do is get up and race one rested 400? She swims faster when she’s tired? Sometimes, yes. After all, in training she is well warmed up, her body has run through the spectrum and swum faster and faster, so her aerobic systems are working at full steam and her stroke rhythm York YMCA Competitive is perfect and grooved, and she is energized from racing her teammates and shooting after concrete goals without the pressure she often feels in meets. Practice is much less threatening than meets.

NOT even Ted Williams batted a thousand. No one improves every time out.

Don’t expect best times every swim; if you do, you will frustrate yourself to death in less than a season, and you will put so much pressure on your swimmer that she will quit the sport early. You would think that if a swimmer goes to practice, works hard, and has good coaching and a good program, then constant improvement would be inevitable. Wrong. So much more goes into swimming than just swimming.

THE Rubber band effect. It would be easier for the swimmer, his parents, and his coach if improvements were made slowly and gradually, if all involved could count on hard work in practice producing corresponding improvements in competition every month. This “ideal”, however, is so rare as to be nonexistent. Often improvements are made in leaps, not baby steps. Improvement happens by fits and starts, mostly because improvement results as much from psychology as from physiology. It is harder this way, because less predictable. Further, swimmers and their parents tend to become a bit discouraged during the short “plateaus” when the improvements that the child is making are not obvious; then, when the rubber band has snapped and the swimmer makes a long-awaited breakthrough, they expect the nearly vertical improvement curve to continue, which it will not do. Fortunately, because our program emphasizes aerobic training, the long plateaus common in sprint programs are rare here.

THERE is a lot more to swimming than just swimming. This will become especially apparent as the swimmer gets older, say around puberty. But even for the young kids, inconsistency is the rule. What’s going on in a swimmer’s head can either dovetail with the training or completely counteract the hours and hours in the pool. Again, if a swimmer has been staying up late, not allowing her body to recover from training, or if she’s been forsaking her mother’s nutritious meals for BigMacs, fries, and shakes, that swimmer’s “hidden training” will counteract what she’s been doing in the water. Again, if a swimmer is in the dumps and can’t see straight after breaking up with his girlfriend, the best coach and the best program in the world will not save today’s race.

TERMINAL strokes and “coachability”. Often young swimmers, especially “successful” younger swimmers who are very strong for their age, have terminal strokes – i.e., strokes that are inefficient dead-ends, strokes that will not allow for much if any improvement, strokes that consist of bulling through the water and not getting much for the huge outpouring of effort and energy. For kids with terminal strokes, it is time to throw away the stopwatch, slow down, and learn to swim all over again. Often this adjustment period is characterized by slower times, which is difficult for the swimmer and for the parents. Difficult, but necessary, because this one step backwards will allow for ten steps forward soon enough.

Note that for the stroke improvement to be made, the swimmer (and parent, supporting the coach’s decision) must be coachable: they must trust that the coach is knowledgeable and thinking of the swimmer’s best interests, and they must be willing to trust that the changes that feel awful at first (because the swimmer’s body is used to doing things a certain way, that way feels comfortable, and any other way is going to be resisted) will help him be a better swimmer. This coachability, this trust, is unfortunately rare. Most kids choose not to change horses in the middle of the stream, and both the horse and rider drown. Terminal strokers are soon caught by swimmers who are smaller but more efficient.

BIGGER is better?? The subject of early and late bloomers is a sensitive one, but nonetheless very important for parents to understand. Early and late bloomers each have “virtues” and “challenges.”

To begin with early developers. They get bigger and stronger earlier than the other kids, which means they are more likely to win their races. That early success is the virtue. However, because they can often win without having to work on their technique or train very hard, often they do not develop a solid work ethic, and often their technique is poor as they bull through the water. Note that from the child’s immediate perspective, NOT working hard and NOT working on technique is a rational choice. After all, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”: what he has done has obviously been working, since he has been highly successful, so why should he listen to the coach tell him that he needs to work harder or change his stroke? He beats all the other kids who listen to the coach, work harder, and change their strokes!

So our pragmatist reaches the ages of thirteen to fifteen and suddenly the other kids whom he used to destroy in meets are catching up to him and even passing him. The size and strength advantage that he had relied on has deserted him, and he has no technique or work ethic to fall back on. He is not long for the sport: many early bloomers quit when their easy successes dry up. We avoid this future problem by not allowing the early bloomers to bask in the temporary limelight, but training them for their long run benefit, and educating them about how they should judge their own performances both in meets and in practices.

On to the late bloomers. They are smaller and weaker than the others, so they get crushed in swimming meets. If the coach, swimmer, and parent emphasize places and winning, then there is little chance that this late bloomer will stay in the sport. This, too, is rational: “Why should I keep swimming? I’m obviously lousy, even though I’m working my guts out and doing everything the coach asks. I’m still getting killed! Coach is a bozo and I’m just not meant to be a swimmer.”

That is the obvious downside. However, if the coach and parents can help the swimmer find enough rewards from swimming, for instance improvement, meeting personal challenges, friendships, etc., to stick it out through the lean years, and if she relies on technique and hard work to overcome the temporary physical deficit, then she is in the driver’s seat in a few years. It is usually the case that the late bloomers end up bigger and stronger than the others – it just takes them longer to get there. And the qualities in the water and in their heads serve them well in senior swimming.

Note well: it is almost impossible to tell how talented your swimmer is, or how much potential your swimmer has for swimming, by looking at 10 & Under meet results. Races will often just tell you who is bigger and stronger, and that probably won’t last.

PUBERTY complicates everything. You would think that because they are getting bigger and presumably stronger, your swimmers would be getting faster. Yes and no. Whether fair or not, in the end puberty is highly beneficial to almost all boys, but with girls can be more ambiguous. Boys lose fat and gain muscle, getting bigger and stronger; girls, too, gain in height and strength, but they also add fat deposits. With proper nutrition (that does not mean starvation diets or eating disorders) and proper training (lots and lots of aerobic work, consistently), these questionable changes can be kept to a minimum, with no long-term harmful effects.

In the short run, during puberty kids are growing, but they are growing unevenly. Arms and legs and torsos don’t have the same proportions as they did last week, either of strength or length, so coordination can go haywire. Strokes may fall apart, or come and go. Also, various psychological changes are affecting swimming and everything else. Interests change and priorities are re-ordered. All these changes can cause the child’s athletic performances to stagnate. It can be a highly frustrating time for all involved. Fortunately, it doesn’t last long, and the swimmer emerges from a chrysalis a beautiful (and fast and strong) butterfly.

THE perils of getting older. Aging up is sometimes traumatic. Formerly very good ten year olds become mediocre 11 & 12’s overnight. And often, the better they were in the younger age group, and the higher their expectations of success, the more traumatic the change is for them, because the more their “perceived competence” has suddenly nose-dived as they now race against bigger and stronger and faster competition. They are bonsais racing sequoia trees, and the standards of judgment have ratcheted up dramatically. The fastest kids are much faster than they are, to the point that they think they cannot compete, so they figure, “Why try? Working hard isn’t going to get me far, anyway. I may as well wait until my ‘good year.’” Often we see a tremendous jump upwards in practice intensity as swimmers approach their last meet in an age group (they want to go out with a bang), then a tremendous plummeting in that intensity as they become just one of the pack. This is in despite of the coach’s discussing the matter with the swimmer.

A Special Note about Swimmers New to the BWST Program. When they first join our program, no kids are hard workers. This sounds harsh, but it is true nonetheless. Compared with all other local swimming programs, we swim longer and harder and have much higher expectations. Swimmers have never really had to work very hard before, relatively, so they don’t know what it’s like. What used to be strenuous is now defined as easy swimming. Swimmers have never really had high goals before, relatively, so they don’t know how to make them or how to bring them about. What used to be fast isn’t any longer, and their new teammates are talking about strange things called “NRT’s” and “Quad A’s”. It takes several months for a swimmer’s body and mind to adapt to the new demands and new expectations. Often the initial shock to the system is difficult, but it is made superable by extra support and encouragement from parent and coach. And then they bloom. Many parents have remarked to me on the changes that the program has wrought in their children: we have a new child who is ready to take on the world, who is confident in his abilities, and who has new and much higher expectations of himself.

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 4 – Part 5 – Part 6

A Few Suggestions on HOW TO BE A BETTER SWIMMING PARENT–Part 2 of 6

Adapted from an article written By Michael Brooks, Head Coach, York YMCA Swimming

NOTA BENE

A JOURNEY OF A THOUSAND MILES

THE patience of Job. Your swimmer’s career in the program is a long haul, with many peaks and valleys. Usually, the new parent and swimmer come to the sport with little experience, so the first sign of a problem looks like the Grand Canyon, impossible to get across, and the first sign of success looks like Mount Everest – we’re on top of the world. It’s best not to get too worked up. You will see this again, over and over.

TAKING the long view. The training that will make an eight year old the area’s fastest 25 freestyler is not the training that will benefit that swimmer most in the long run. Making decisions now that will benefit the swimmer over the long haul of a swimming career calls for prudence, and it means sacrificing some speed now for huge gains later. Now we make them beautiful in the water, now we make them fit, now we teach them to expect great things, and later we make them superfast. Our destination is not two weeks down the road, but several years.

McDONALDS v. Michelin Three-Star. The fast food mentality, the attitude that “I want it NOW!” (even if it tastes like cardboard) is anathema to what we are about. Think of the swimming program, and your swimmer’s career in the program, as a fine meal in the very best French restaurant: more courses than you can count (phases and seasons), served in a very particular order (developmentally determined), each patiently savored (the cumulative effects of years’ worth of daily training), completed by dessert and coffee (Nationals). We are not in search of a quick Big Mac. We want the best, and we are willing to wait.

Part 1 – Part 3 – Part 4 – Part 5 – Part 6

A Few Suggestions on HOW TO BE A BETTER SWIMMING PARENT–Part 1 of 6

Adapted from an article written By Michael Brooks, Head Coach, York YMCA Swimming

NOTA BENE

TEACHING VALUES

YOU are key to your child’s swimming. A parent’s attitude toward swimming, the program, the coach, and his child’s participation, is key towards the child’s attitude and success. The young swimmer takes cues from his parent. If the parent shows by word, deed, facial expression, etc., that he does not value swimming, that he doesn’t appreciate having to drive to practice or sit in the stands during meets, that “it’s not going to matter” if the child skips practice, that practices are just “optional” and that the child would be better off with the extra sleep or rest, then the chances are very good that the child will lack commitment, have little success, then lose interest in swimming. Support your child’s interest in swimming by being positively interested.

ALLOW your swimmer to be resilient. Failure, and facing that failure, doesn’t cause kids to melt. Failure isn’t such an evil thing that parents should try to shield their kids from it. Allow them to fail, then teach them to get up off the canvas and try harder to succeed the next time. If parents are continually sheltering their swimmers from the storm, cushioning every fall, making excuses for them, finding someone else to blame, the children never learn anything. Even worse, they never learn that they are responsible both for their failures and for their successes. Allow them to stand on their own, and you will be helping them immeasurably down the road.

MOLEHILLS really are molehills. At times we may appear unsympathetic or even harsh because we won’t let kids stop for “emergencies”: for leaking goggles, for kids passing them, for side-aches, for stretching, for repeated bathroom breaks, etc. Many kids think that the slightest obstacle is an overwhelming reason to stop and should be listened to and followed as the voice of God. We think not. We are trying to teach focus.

When a swimmer is in the middle of a set, the only thing in life that matters or is worthy of attention is the set. Little “bothers” are to be overcome or ignored. And once a swimmer gets in the habit of overcoming these “little bothers,” he finds that they aren’t so overwhelmingly important after all. If we are continually stopping for “emergencies,” we will never get anything done. If a study session is continually interrupted for sharpening pencils, then getting a better notepad, then getting a drink of water, then taking a little break when a favorite song comes on the radio, then answering the telephone, almost miraculously the math assignment doesn’t get completed.

DON’T worry, be happy??? I don’t want a swimmer doing cartwheels after an awful performance. It’s okay for them to be upset about, disappointed with, even angry about having done poorly. Feeling lousy for a few minutes won’t kill them, it won’t forever damage their self-esteem, and if they are thinking correctly it will motivate them to try harder and do better the next time. We want to teach them standards of good and bad performance, so that when they really do well, they will feel appropriately pleased. If they are simply showered with praise willy nilly, they never know the difference.

TEACH them to dream big – a world of infinite possibilities. If you try to temper your child’s dreams, if you teach her to settle for the ordinary, you may indeed save her from many a heartache and many a failure. But you also rob her of the opportunity of achieving great things, and the opportunity to plumb her depths and realize her potential. Winning big means failing many times along the way. Each failure hurts, but these temporary setbacks create the strength for the final push. Instead of having children avoid failure by never taking risks, teach them how to think correctly about failing: risk-taking and failure are necessary for improvement, development, motivation, feedback, and long-term success.

WHAT success is. Only one swimmer can win the race. Often in the younger age groups, the winner will be the one who has bloomed early, not necessarily the swimmer with the most talent or the most potential to succeed in senior swimming. It is expected that every parent wants his child to succeed, wants his child to have a good and learning and valuable experience with swimming. Every child can succeed – only make sure you define success correctly: being the very best you can be, striving for improvement in every aspect of swimming. That leads to lasting success. And lasting enjoyment.

DON’T reward success by bribery. “Bribing” your swimmer to perform well by promising presents, money, special meals, etc. for meeting various standards is highly discouraged. While bribery may work in the short run – the swimmer may indeed swim fast this afternoon – the long term consequences are never good. You have to keep upping the ante, and you must ask yourself: why does my swimmer want to swim fast? What is really motivating him? Is this good? What is a twelve year old going to do with a new car?

FUN, fun, fun. If “fun” means mindless entertainment and sensory bombardment, then wasting hours playing X-box is loads of fun, and swimming is by definition “not fun.” If “fun” means working hard and challenging yourself, taking pride in accomplishing difficult goals, and discovering talents you didn’t know you had, then swimming is fun and X-box by definition is “not fun.” The meaning of fun is very much an open question for children, and one where parents and coaches have much influence over their charges. Are we building a nation of energized achievers or lifeless couch potatoes?

WORK, work, work. Persistence and work ethic are the most important qualities leading to success in swimming and everything else. And if a work ethic is not created and cultivated when a swimmer is young, it very likely will never appear. It is so rare as not to be an option that a kid who is a slacker from ages seven to fourteen will suddenly change his spots and become a hard worker. Love for and pride in hard work MUST be inculcated early on, and again parents and coaches have much influence in creating this attitude.

NO little league parents. Kids sometimes make mistakes at meets. If your child is disqualified at a meet, don’t complain, don’t whine, don’t make excuses. Your child’s DQ is not a reflection of the quality of your parenting. The official is not blind, he does not have a vendetta against your child or your family or your team, and he is not incompetent. In fact, he has a much better vantage on your child’s race than you do, and he is looking on dispassionately. You are sitting up in the stands where you can’t see precisely, and you are paying attention to everything except the exact angle of your child’s left foot as he kicks in breaststroke. If a DQ is questionable, as sometimes is the case, the coach – and not the parent – will take the proper steps. And even then, DQ’s are almost never over-turned, so don’t get your hopes up.

By the by, most DQ’s aren’t surprises to the coach. If a swimmer rehearses an illegal turn forty thousand times in training despite a coach’s remonstrance’s, then that illegal habit will likely show up under the stress of a race. As Joe Paterno said, “Practice good to play good.”

BURNOUT is over-rated. So many times parents and kids will say, “I don’t want to commit to swimming because I don’t want to get burned out.” But for every one case of “burnout” caused by a swimmer’s spending too much time in the water and working too hard, we will see a hundred cases of “preemptive burnout”: in order not to be burned out, the swimmer only comes to practice when she feels like it, doesn’t work out very hard, skips team meets with regularity, and generally makes no commitment to the program or to the sport. Not surprisingly, the swimmer swims slow, makes little to no improvement, and sees her formerly slower competitors’ whiz right by her. Then we wonder why she “just can’t get jazzed about swimming.”

Sitting on the fence and remaining lukewarm on principle has nothing to recommend it. Discipline and commitment are good things, not things we should downplay, hide, apologize for, or (worst of all) stop demanding because it may be unpopular. If you want to enjoy swimming even more, commit more of yourself and swim fast! You do not become excited about an activity you don’t do well at.

HOME and pool must dovetail. Traits of discipline, respect, high expectations, and commitment at home directly relate to the child’s characteristics at practices and meets. This is yet another area where family support is crucial to the success of the swimmer. Parents should review, carefully, the Credo and other formative memos about the values the team espouses. If the current at home is flowing in the opposite direction from the current at the pool, there will be big problems. If a family does not buy into the program, they will be very unhappy here.

Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 – Part 5 – Part 6

Nurturing Resilience

Raising children to be competent and caring.

by Michael Ungar, Ph.D.

Olympic Gold Medalists and Raising Resilient Kids

Recent research on how elite athletes succeed is useful to parents who want to raise resilient children.

Published on July 4, 2013 by Michael Ungar, Ph.D. in Nurturing Resilience

In an article in Psychology of Sport and Exercise, David Fletcher and Mustafa Sarkar report on their interviews with Olympic gold medalists and how they cope under the incredible stress that accompanies elite level sport. There are some good lessons here for us parents who want to help our kids achieve the resilience they’ll need when life dishes them up some extreme challenges. Of course, there is one big difference between an Olympic athlete’s resilience and a child who must endure cancer, or whose family tumbles into poverty after a parent loses her job. Olympic athletes “actively seek to engage with challenging situations that present opportunities for them to raise their performance level.” While our children may not choose the challenges they endure, it’s good to remember that coping under stress is a skill that we can coach our children to be better at.

Reaching peak performance, it seems, requires the psychological discipline to remain positive despite setbacks, the ability to maintain inner motivation, be confident even when you feel unsure of yourself, an enduring focus on achieving one’s best, and perceived social support. While the list may sound obvious, there are some not so obvious ways that gold medalists succeed at keeping themselves psychologically resilient.

1) The advantages of setbacks. As odd as it sounds, most of the study’s participants said that while serendipity (being in the right place at the right time) sometimes helped them get a chance to show what they could do, it was life’s challenges that provided them with the motivation to push a little harder. Without some setback, most would not have reached their full potential. The experience of failure brings with it opportunity: the chance to say with certainty whether one wants to give everything one has to achieving one’s goal. Sometimes, those personal challenges were as simple as a bad performance or being denied a spot at a qualifying competition. But personal milestones also played a factor. The loss of a parent, a divorce, a personal injury all caused these athletes to pause and reconsider their commitment to success.

What does this tell us about raising resilient kids? Don’t shelter them from every challenge. Let them fail! Let them experience the bitterness of having not measured up so they can consider what they will have to do to succeed. When things come too easy for those who are gifted, they can become too complacent. A little failure, in manageable amounts, may actually produce a child who can endure life’s setbacks better than a child who is sheltered from failure.

2) The advantages of getting control over one’s thinking. Also known as meta-cognitions, elite athletes control their thinking. There has been an enormous amount of focus on mindfulness training to help people with mental health problems think about how they are behaving in order to help them control those behaviours. It’s like an observer floating above us, watching what we think and do. Elite athletes control their self-talk, know what their goals are, and notice when they are talking themselves out of being able to win.

What does this tell us about raising resilient kids? Help kids think about thinking. Ask a child who is anxious about an exam what he thinks will happen, then offer him some new ways of thinking about the challenge before him. Are the consequences really as bad as he thinks? And is a less than perfect score really the tragedy the child is making it out to be? Ask a child to clarify his goals: what grade does he need to succeed? Learning to control our thoughts is as simple as giving them voice, though terribly complicated to change if we fail to recognize that we can talk ourselves into a panic or a depression.

3) Have a positive personality: Elite athletes tend to be open to new experiences, conscientious, innovative, extroverted, emotionally stable, optimistic and proactive. They seek opportunities to take on challenges and make the most of those opportunities for personal growth.

What does this teach us about raising resilient kids? It is very difficult to change personality types. An Eeyore-like child who is eternally pessimistic may never want to see the world as being full of possibilities. But that doesn’t mean the child can’t be encouraged to try new things by a parent or teacher. Most kids are naturally curious. As caregivers, we can provide kids with the security they need to launch themselves with the confidence they’ll need if they stumble. I liken this to encouraging a child to try out for the school play or basketball team even when she thinks she is good at neither acting or sports. We can train a child to take chances by giving her a push in the right direction and a soft landing when she fails. Optimism can, in fact, be learned.

4) Self-confidence needs others to believe in us: We may think that elite athletes have endless self-confidence, but many Olympians told stories of their self-confidence lagging at critical moments in their careers. At those times, it was their teammates, coaches and family members who provided the external sources of support they needed to maintain their belief in themselves. Those perceived social supports are enduring reasons why elite athletes can train as hard as they do.

What does this teach us about raising resilient kids? Our kids can succeed even if they lack self-confidence as long as those around them maintain a belief in the child’s ability to succeed. As caregivers, we matter a great deal. Being resilient is not something that is necessarily reliant on individual qualities alone but can be awakened by a supportive environment. A child who hears “You can do it” is more likely to succeed at times when he is unsure whether he has what it takes.

5) The goal has to be optimal performance, not the medal! Elite athletes rarely focus on the medal. They focus on doing their absolute best, exploiting every ounce of their energy and passion. That’s what is satisfying. That is what convinces them they are truly worthy of the prizes they win.

What does this teach us about raising resilient kids? We need to focus much less on the medals and accolades and much more on encouraging children to do their best and fully use their abilities. I worry about Tiger Moms and other types of push parenting that insist that good enough is only achieved when the child comes first, which leaves most kids feeling like losers. I admire children who strive to do their best. That’s what I want to applaud, genuine effort rather than another trophy on the wall or admission to some special academic or sport program that brings status to the child (and often the parent). Being resilient means striving to succeed in ways that are meaningful. A student who completes high school and becomes a mechanic is every bit as worthy of my praise as the concert pianist. That’s something Tiger Moms seem to overlook, except when they need their cars fixed. Why would we push the mechanically inclined child into university or the musically inclined to become a doctor? Let’s help children be their best.

I’ve always loved the poetry of the Olympics. These are rare world-class performances that inspire us to be our best. They can also, it seems, teach us something about what makes children resilient.

Copied from www.psychologytoday.com

Helping Athletes Succeed at Prelim/Finals Competitions

Many BLUE WAVE athletes have had the opportunity to compete at prelim/final competitions already this season and we have several prelim/final meets coming up. While the prelim/finals format offers an exciting and high level competition arena, it also requires a more invested effort in preparation and recovery. Swim parents can be especially helpful in these situations.

Athletes face the following issues at meets using the prelim/final format:

Extra swims. Over a 2.5 day prelim/final meet it is common for an athlete to race 14 or more times compared to a typical timed final competition where 7-9 swims is normal, and many prelim/final meets run 3 or 4 days.
Intense competition. Prelim/finals competitions bring out the best in athletes. Expect a heightened level of competition.
Recovery & Energy Management. Warming up, cooling down, stretching/rolling, snacking, eating meals, sleeping and traveling to and from the pool become significantly more important in a prelim/final meet. Inadequate recovery will manifest itself very quickly in this arena.
Travel. These meets are often away from home territory. Hotel rooms and eating out each day carry their own benefits and challenges.
Time. These meets spread swims over a much longer period of time. Where an athlete will be on the pool deck for 4-5 hours per day for a typical timed final meet, 8-9 hours per day is not uncommon for prelim/finals competitions.

Scheduling & Timeline

A traditional prelim/final format calls for preliminaries during the morning session followed by a finals session in the evening. At most meets, athletes will have several hours rest between sessions. It is critical for athletes to rest during this period if they are qualified to compete at finals. Make sure your athlete gets a good lunch and an hour to 1.5 hours of sleep (sleeping longer than 1.5 hours can have a negative effect as this is due to natural sleep cycles) and downtime in the middle of the day. Watching a movie and resting with friends are both better than spending the day walking around a mall or at a restaurant, but neither are as effective as an hour to 1.5 hours of napping.

Most hosting teams will publish meet timelines for prelim/finals competitions on their team or LSC website. Coaches can also usually provide this information if it has not been posted. Communication is key in this situation.

Hotels & Eating Out

There are many different variables in selecting a hotel, of course, but in ideal conditions selecting a suite or hotel room with separate bedrooms is a great decision. This will allow athletes to find a quiet place to rest during between sessions. On most travel trips, coaches generally recommend athletes bring familiar items like pillows and blankets from home. Many families also prefer to select hotel rooms with kitchenettes so they can avoid eating out during the competition.

When selecting restaurants, try to avoid fast or fried foods. Eating "comfortable" foods is a familiar idea. See nutrition suggestions on our website. Ordering in advance can help to reduce the amount of time spent at the restaurant (and increase the amount of time spent resting). It is common for swim families to work together, sending one parent to pick up a lunch or dinner order while another parent carts athletes from the pool to the hotel or restaurant.

During the meet itself, athletes should be supplied with snacks and drinks. The key idea here is that athletes are staying fueled for future sessions of the meet, not necessarily their current session. It is an important difference to note as athletes need to continuously fuel and hydrate their bodies over time (without over eating), particularly during preliminary competition.

For more information on what to eat check out these articles:

“Smart eating for swimmers on race day”

"Fueling For Performance"

Last But Not Least...

Parents should view themselves as their athlete's personal manager or support staff during these longer competitions. The goal of a parent here should be to reduce the number of stress factors each athlete's experiences, not increase them. Remember that coaches, coach please eliminate talking about race strategy or swim technique during breaks. Strive to create a comfortable, stress free environment for your athlete away from the pool.

Trust your training and have fun at these upcoming Championship meets. Go for it and swim FAST BLUE WAVE!

BALANCING ACADEMICS AND ATHLETICS – WHAT YOUR COACH IS REALLY THINKING

THIS IS MAKING YOUR COACH PULL HIS OR HER HAIR OUT.

HERE’S WHERE STUDENT-ATHLETES HAVE A CHANCE TO GROW

INSTEAD, WE SHOULD BE STARTING EARLY, AND TEACHING YOUR ATHLETE’S STRATEGIES FOR DUAL ATHLETIC AND ACADEMIC SUCCESS

The Missing Ingredient

More Important Than Talent

Empowering and Educating Parents Will Fix the Youth Sports Mess

What Teachers Really Want To Tell Parents

5 Tips for Mental Toughness

Help Your Child Survive, and Thrive with a Coach

A Few Suggestions on HOW TO BE A BETTER SWIMMING PARENT–Part 6 of 6

A Few Suggestions on HOW TO BE A BETTER SWIMMING PARENT–Part 5 of 6

A Few Suggestions on HOW TO BE A BETTER SWIMMING PARENT–Part 4 of 6

A Few Suggestions on HOW TO BE A BETTER SWIMMING PARENT–Part 3 of 6

A Few Suggestions on HOW TO BE A BETTER SWIMMING PARENT–Part 2 of 6

A Few Suggestions on HOW TO BE A BETTER SWIMMING PARENT–Part 1 of 6

Nurturing Resilience

Olympic Gold Medalists and Raising Resilient Kids

Helping Athletes Succeed at Prelim/Finals Competitions

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