Parents are the key to your child's swimming
A parent's attitude toward swimming, the program, the coach, and his child's participation, is key towards the child success. The young swimmer takes cues from his parent. If the parent shows by word, fact or expression that he does not value swimming, that he doesn't appreciate having to drive to practice or sit in the stands during meets, that "it's not going to matter" if a child skips practice, that morning practices are "optional", and that the child would be better off with extra sleep, then the chances are very good that the child will lack commitment, have little success, then lose interest in swimming. Support your child's interest in swimming by being positively interested.
Allow your swimmer to be resilient
Failure isn't such an evil thing that parents should try to shield their kids from it. Allow them to fail, then teach them to get up and try harder to succeed the next time. If parents are continually sheltering their children, cushioning every fall, making excuses for them, finding someone else to blame, the children never learn anything. Even worse they never learn that they are responsible both for their failures and for their successes. Just allow them to stand on their own.
Teach them to dream big
If you try to temper your children's dreams, and teach them to settle for ordinary, you may save them from many headaches and failures. But you also prevent them to achieve great things. Winning big means failing many times along the way. Each failure hurts, but these temporary setbacks create the strength for the final push. Instead of having children avoid failure, teach them how to think correctly about failing: risk taking and failure are necessary for improvement, development, motivation, and long term success.
What success is
It is expected that every parent wants his child to succeed, wants his child to have a good and learning and valuable experience with swimming. Every child can succeed, just make sure you define success correctly: being the best you can be, striving for improvement in every aspect of swimming. |
Parents 