How to Deal with Helicopter Parents | 3 Keys to Raising an Athlete

How to Deal with Helicopter Parents

In today’s fast-paced, high-stress society, we are under more pressure than ever to succeed, particularly regarding athletic achievement earlier than ever. While I believe that competition is a good thing, I think that too much competition leads to anxiety and needless tension. This article will help you to deal with helicopter parents. I will also introduce you to a book that, is the Blueprint for raising a Child.

Helicopter parents definition

This is the definition of a helicopter parent. Helicopter parents are easily identifiable: They cheer too loud for too long, take failures personally and are slow to recover, are obsessed with perfection, and promote an imbalance in their children’s lives, whereby social development is neglected in favor of athletic achievement.

Characteristics of helicopter parents

As parents, we are exemplars for our children, teaching them how to handle themselves and modeling how to handle competitive life’s ups and downs best. However, too many parents fail to realize how powerful a role they play in the developmental life of their young athletes. They confuse their dreams with their children’s dreams, and they believe that they can assist their children in anticipating and avoiding the inevitable obstacles that face all athletes.

Effects of helicopter parents

Over time, they become increasingly obsessed with their children’s athletic achievements and attempt to utilize all the resources to ensure athletically success. On occasion, their children do well. However, they fail to realize that their children didn’t grow up BECAUSE of them. They succeeded. DESPITE them.

Three easy tips for dealing with helicopter parents

What follows are three easy tips that any parent can follow to ensure that they do not become overly involved in their young athlete’s life in a detrimental manner. This is also responsible for the parents maintaining the children’s mental health so they may not suffer from psychological disturbances.


How to Deal with Helicopter ParentsYou can read the book title Raising an Adult: 4 Critical Habits that you need to know for your child’s life. The book is a blueprint for raising a child. The book is Mark L. Brenner s breakthrough book. He clearly discussed how to minimize helicopter parenting by reducing the communication gap.

 


1. Get perspective

As a parent, you need to keep perspective. You need to understand that your children may be a product of your genes, but they are also individuals with their own lives to live.

A healthy parenting perspective also means understanding that sports are not life but rather one small part of life. They allow us to learn powerful lessons we can apply later in life (work ethic, losing with grace, setting goals, etc.). But they also teach irrationality (life is about winning or losing). As parents, we need to have perspective.

Very few athletes make it to the highest echelons in their respective sports. All athletes, however, can learn the important lessons that sport teaches and can do it in a way that is both fun and healthy.

2. Teach your child to be responsible for their own choices

Most people have no clue how to listen to others. It has less to do with content (or the subject matter of the discussion) and more with the process (how they say it, at what time, in what manner, etc.).

As parents, we need to attend:

One of the great lessons we need to learn to be successful in anything, much fewer sports, is that we are ultimately responsible for making our own choices at any given moment. You can frequently provide psychology gifts to help develop the child’s cognition.

As parents, we sometimes forget this and try to make decisions for our children, thinking we know what is best for them. However, what happens is that, by making the decisions for our children, we forestall their ability to understand the connection between choice and consequence.

This is a crucial life lesson. When our children aren’t allowed the developmental space to learn that hard work pays dividends or that there are lessons to be learned that accompany any loss, they fail to internalize important aspects of normal social development.

You may like: 5 best sports books ever written

3. Prioritize fun over achievement

Sports should be fun; we as parents tend to lose sight of this. Our vision becomes clouded by immediate successes, especially when our children achieve at levels we never attained.

Therefore, it’s vital to actively prioritize having fun while competing as a central part of athletic participation. Young athletes that don’t have fun experience more burnout and psychological disturbance (in my opinion and work experience).

This happens while participating in sports, than do their counterparts that participate for intrinsic reasons.

These are the three things that need to deal with helicopter parents. If you have any questions, please feel free to comment on us from the below comment box.

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Last update on 2024-03-17 / Affiliate links / Images from Amazon Product Advertising API

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