How Youth Sports Creates Future Leaders Or Future Cheaters
Youth sports teaches children vital life skills through competition, but according to a Texas A&M professor, this could be detrimental if it causes kids to rationalize bad behavior.
What do the CEOs of Whole Foods, Bank of America and Nike have in common? According to a Forbes article, they are among the 95% of Fortune 500 CEOs who played sports in college.
Regardless of a child’s future life path, youth sports can teach valuable life lessons during a critical moment of development. Through sports, children can engage in friendly competition and collaborate with a team toward an ultimate goal. Inherent in every game is the fact that one team will win and one team will lose.
Although some parents might fear letting their kids fail, research from Dr. Andrea Ettekal, a professor in the Department of Educational Psychology at Texas A&M University, shows failure in youth sports is vital for positive development.
“Sometimes we think of sports as just a game that transcends our daily lives, but what kids are learning by being a part of the game is how you make decisions, how you reason around the type of behaviors you want to display or how you rationalize how you act and treat others,” she said. “It’s the inherent competition in the sport that causes many of the good outcomes that kids get out of sports.”
Youth sports can teach kids how to persevere in the face of failure and continue to grow outside their own skill level. This determination can be applied to many aspects of life outside of sports, including future exams, relationships and in the workplace. Alongside learning how to fail, Ettekal’s research shows that youth sports teach kids how to treat others.
“I boil it all down to character development, and character is our capacity to serve the world beyond ourselves,” she said. “It includes not just our ability to morally reason, but our performance capacities to be able to enact moral virtue to create a greater good. Sport is a place where we practice that.”
Some other skills that kids learn in youth sports are grit, compassion and moral virtues. All of these skills come from the competition element inherent in sports.
“We always talk about sports being a place where we have fun, but if you ask a kid what’s fun, it’s not just playing games. It is the competition,” she said. “They think it’s fun to engage in competition and challenge themselves to try harder, so we have to shift our focus around and pay attention to what our kids are focusing on and what they’re getting out of this context.”
While sports are a great learning ground, there are a few key behaviors coaches and parents should look for to ensure their kid isn’t adopting bad traits. When kids cheat at games, Ettekal said they could generalize these rules to other settings in a phenomenon called game reasoning.
“They think that what they’re doing in the game only matters in that game, but it leads to risky thinking,” she said. “If it was OK to cheat or intentionally injure an opponent during a game, when they begin working for a company, they may make the same rules of, ‘How do I cheat my way to the top,’ because they have rationalized that as OK.”
Ettekal said sports can also become maladaptive for kids if they begin to become hyper-competitive with a focus on the individual.
“When kids are burnt out on sports, usually that’s because they’re focused on being the superstar and being the best, typically focused on these ego-oriented outcomes,” she said. “One of the primary ways that we can tell it’s not going well is when the kid quits talking about the relationships involved in the game or quit connecting with their coach.”
According to Ettekal’s research, coaches who are interested in taking a more developmental approach to youth sports should consider themselves as “developmental practitioners” and focus less on just relaying technical information.
“You’re a part of these kid’s lives, their stories, and you should think about yourself as the role model, the relational leader and the teacher who also teaches the technical skills of sports,” she said. “If you can shift your thinking on what the purpose of that job is, you can expand the potential of your impact.”
