Youth sports are a fantastic way to impart lessons in self-confidence. There are two sides to the confidence coin: faith in someone else and faith in yourself.

Your child should be learning both of these as they play.

Confidence in others

Learning to rely on others is an incredibly important lesson in youth sports that is often overlooked. Often, we are so busy encouraging kids, “You can do this,” that we forget an important lesson. Sometimes, in order to get the job done, your child needs to rely on others.

Here’s the balancing act: teaching kids independence and to understand the value of the team. The trick is helping them learn these two concepts at the same time.

Although these concepts may seem incompatible, they are not, and here's why:

Independence does not mean that your child should learn to do it alone, it means they learn to think on their own. Even those who think on their own will encounter instances when they will need to depend on others. Accordingly, it is important to teach your child the value of relying on others while learning to think for themselves.

This may be hard to do when the person your child needs to rely on doesn’t seem trustworthy. In youth sports, your child may hesitate to throw the ball to a certain team member because he doesn’t trust that the teammate will catch the ball. It is within those moments that your child must learn to rely on his teammate, even if he is not confident in him.

That’s a hard lesson for a child to learn, but what’s the alternative?

If your child does not learn to rely on teammates, he will become the sort of athlete who thinks he needs to do it all on his own.

Self-Confidence

Aside from trusting others, trusting ME is probably one of the biggest mental battles that athletes face. Many struggle to trust that they have fully prepared themselves to handle any situation they may encounter.

I want to be clear; in no way am I claiming to be a mental toughness guru. However, as a mom of three grown athletes, I think I’ve learned a lot about helping kids understand how to be mentally tough.

But let’s take a minute and talk parent-to-parent. I know that you want your kids to develop into confident young adults, but helping them during this process can be a very frustrating journey. Ultimately, you cannot make your kids more confident. However, you can provide an environment that fosters growth in confidence.

Think of your child’s confidence as a living plant. You can help the plant by putting it in the ground, watering it, fertilizing it, watering it some more, trimming it, and pulling weeds, but you cannot force the plant to grow. You can only provide the best environment possible.

That’s what you do when it comes to helping your child become more confident. You provide the best environment possible–encouragement, permission to fail, grace when they do fail, good teachers and coaches, positive teammates–for your child’s confidence to sprout and bloom.

Your child will only understand confidence if he tries, fails, learns, succeeds, and keeps trying some more. Remember, growing confidence is a process and the best thing that you can do for your child is to create the best possible enviroment.

 

Janis B. Meredith, sports mom and coach’s wife, writes a sports parenting blog called jbmthinks.com. Her new book 11 Habits for Happy and Positive Sports Parents is on Amazon.