By Stacy DeBroff

After a game or recital, focus your comments on how your child performed. Provide support for your child by listening to her and try to understand her feelings. Ask your child open-ended questions such as, “Did you enjoy yourself?,” “What did you think of the game today?,” or “How did you think it went?”

• For sports, shift the emphasis from the win or lose outcome. How you react to wins and losses of your child’s team can set up a dynamic in which your child wants mostly to win to please you and make you proud.

• Instead of just having fun and enjoying the activity, parental approval or coach approval becomes your child’s driving motivation. After a practice, ask about what your child learned, what skill she thinks she’s best at or most needs to improve, and if she enjoyed it.

• Praise your child for her effort and the new skills she acquires. “What a GREAT effort against a tough team!” becomes the slogan for a lost game.

• The car ride home might seem like the perfect place and time to discuss your child’s performance. However, your child is often exhausted, working through her own reaction to the situation, and vulnerable to criticism. Ask questions focused on what your child thought of the experience, rather than offering your own impressions and observations.

• Don’t offer much in the way of unsolicited advice, unless your child asks for your help or input. Leave it up to her coaches and teachers to offer constructive feedback and tips for how to improve.

• Develop a fun post-game or performance ritual, such as taking everyone out to a cheap-eats dinner after the game. Make it part of your ritual on game days to stop for ice cream or pizza, win or lose.

• Ask what she enjoyed the most about performing. You might be surprised that the answer is not scoring the winning goal, but some other moment that was fun.

WHAT TO SAY AFTER A TOUGH LOSS

• Make sure that your child knows that win or lose, you love her, appreciate her efforts, and do not feel disappointed in her. This will prevent her from fearing your disapproval if she fails. This applies also to bad music recitals or drama performances.

• Don’t be a fair-weather fan, liking your child most when she performs well, or becoming frustrated or angry when she does poorly.

• Be the one person your child can always look to for encouragement and positive reinforcement.

• While you want to reassure your child, you also want to acknowledge a hard loss and be open to hearing about any frustration, discouragement, anger, or self-criticism your child feels in response.

• Don’t give false praise, which your child will instantly detect and resent. Your child tends to know when she didn’t play her best or made critical mistakes.

KEEPING WINNING IN PERSPECTIVE

• Emotions often run high at games because the stakes feel high, gven all the practices, time, energy, and family investment that goes into your child participating. It’s natural to want your child, and by extension your child’s team, to do well. It can also feel at times like your child’s failures are your own. • Instill in your child a deep-seated belief that you love her no matter what, regardless of how well she performs, the milestones she achieves, or the wins she accumulates. You don’t want your child to be the one that fears that you will be mad if she blows it at a critical performance or game.

• It is a constant struggle to keep reminding your child that winning is not the most important thing. Make sure you share with her all the other values that are important in participating in sports, activities, or being part of a team. These include skill-building, the opportunity to test those skills against a worthy opponent, the value of being a part of a team, and the satisfaction of having given your best effort. Other values to emphasize include fun, fitness and being physically active, improving, fair play, persistence, and tenacity. Encourage your child to always think broadly about what accomplishment means. There are important benefits less quantifiable than trophies or awards. Emphasize in actions and words to your child that winning isn’t always the ultimate goal and that there are many equally important ways to be successful.

• Winning can’t be discounted, as it’s important in a competitive situation, but should be secondary when your child is striving to build skills and achieve personal goals. If you emphasize skill building, you motivate your child to better herself. This places the emphasis on things your child has control over, unlike the outcome of a team game. Lending your child contextual perspective on winning or losing helps your child set achievable goals for herself.

STRESS EFFORT, NOT PERFORMANCE

• Praise your child for trying hard, regardless of the outcome of a game or performance.

• If your child sees winning as the only acceptable outcome, then she’ll spend most of her energy during a game or competition trying to avoid making mistakes, and blaming others when those mistakes inevitably happen.

• Accept that there will be plenty of times when you will be at the end of your child’s anger and frustration.

• Tell your child that while winning isn’t everything, trying to win is, and that you will consider your child successful if she puts forth her best effort every time she plays.

• Measure your child’s performance by the effort she puts forth, the skills she acquires, and her achievement of personal goals. Get your child competing against herself with realistic goals, and concentrating on doing her personal best. If your child conceptualizes success in terms of “am I getting better?” she will focus on mastering new skills and likely stick with the sport longer. If your child’s primary focus in on winning, she will be more likely to want to quit in the face of failure.

• Stress as well the importance of teamwork, self-discipline, and perseverance.

• Don’t expect your child to be or become one of the best players on the team, and recognize that every child has inevitable lulls in skill development.

• There will be times you watch your child play poorly, and your have to downplay your own frustration or disappointment.

• It’s so important that your child know that you value her efforts above all else. That’s not to say that you won’t praise her accomplishments and cheer her victories, but it does mean that you won’t disparage her failures, setbacks, or lack of raw talent at a particular endeavor.

DON’T PUSH TOO HARD

• Children do their best and benefit from activities that they feel comfortable doing. If you try to rush your child, you can make her feel intimidated and turn her off the activity. Kids need to progress at their own pace. The less you push her, the more likely she will take it upon herself to succeed.

• Viewing your child as an extension of yourself puts unhealthy pressure on her. You can tell when this is happening when you start referring to sports and activities in which your child participates in plural terms, such as, “We do karate, soccer in the fall and T-ball in the spring.”

AVOID COMPARING YOUR CHILD TO HER PEERS

• Comparing your child to her peers or teammates is unhealthy and demoralizing for you both. It can make you and her feel anxious and inadequate. Instead of trying to figure out who is outpacing your child, ask yourself, “Is my child having fun? Has she been learning and gaining new skills?” As long as this is the case, push your worries aside.

• Your child will take a different path, learn different activities at different speeds, and achieve different levels of success than you or her peers have experienced.

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