Parental Issues Within Coaching

This post will discuss current issues with parents in a sports coaching and teaching environment and also look into what problems coaches face in terms of parents. 

Parents can be a massive hindrance to the coaching process in terms of interfering with the coaching taking place. Sometimes parents can give advice to their son or daughter but this can go against what the coach is trying to do. On the other hand parents can play a useful role in reinforcing what the coach is trying to do and this can result in positive impact on the coaching process. 

After speaking to another coach, he explains that in grass roots football parents provide many challenges for him as a coach but also for the officials. The coach works with an under 14's football team and has experienced some poor behaviour by the parents. When an official told the opposing team's manager to get off the field because he was actually standing on the pitch, the parents and other coaches started hurling abuse at the referee and this filtered down to the players. The players joined in with the parents and coaches abusing the referee and the coach who i spoke to said that the official handled it really well and stopped the game to ask the coach "Is this the example you set for your players?"

At times parents can be a coaches worst enemy and it is the same with teaching, teachers nowadays are afraid of giving students detentions because of the hassle the teacher will get off parents. When I discussed this with a few coaches, we came to a decision that if we all had a child that was in trouble we would back the teacher or coach. We would be more interested in why the child has been in trouble, because we would have raised the child better than that and they should be able to follow rules. 

In my experience I have found that too many parents wrap their children up in cotton wool. Don't get me wrong I don't want parents too care less about their children, however when they go to coaching sessions and tell their children that 'they don't have to do anything they don't want to do' this makes it difficult for the coach. Attitudes like that can spread around a group very quickly and I found this out the other week; one child in the group didn't want to run around the track for the warm up and because the child objected this resulted in a few of the other children sitting out of the next activity. 

Today's society is making it very difficult for coaches and teachers to control groups of children, this is because if the child gets told off and tells their parents the coach or teacher will have to deal with the aggravated parent. My advice to parents is to support the coaches and teachers, I understand the child will come up with the excuse of "everybody else was doing it" This doesn't excuse the behaviour and if the child has been made an example of then the teacher or coach should be praised for taking control of the situation and not be challenged. 

To conclude, children will copy their parents behaviour so it's important that parents set a good example for their children to follow. Coaches should be supported by parents as they will always consider the welfare of their participants and they wouldn't put their welfare in jeopardy. The parent should be more concerned as to why the child is misbehaving instead of 'having a go' at the teacher or coach for telling their child off.