He is 11 and literally ignorant. There are two sides of this coin to learn. Fighting and winning or losing. And if he’s allowed to lose comfortably he will default to it.
I agree with the post above that structure needs to be provided here. Schedule and activity within the schedule specifically reaching clear goals. A better dive, half a second off time et cetera. Give him the focus and then reward the shit out him hitting the goal. I disagree with rewarding the process in between personally but have no problem breaking large goals in to smaller goals and rewarding accomplishment of each one.
For the record I do this with adult employees too, and I can tell who was encouraged to win early vs allowed to lose.
I grew up in a similar household. Lots of pressure and sometimes undue. There is a balance though. Pressure is part of life and learning to manage or even use it is valuable. Just don’t crush him. Love him in his losses and struggles while encouraging the next goal. You’ll know his limit better than anyone.
I think both can be good and managing each incorrectly can be detrimental.
For example, rewarding a process vs an outcome is intended to nudge someone along to success organically but can inadvertently create a false sense of ego/security/success.
Think of a puzzle. If you group all of the like color pieces together as a step and get a reward for that, you may risk losing the drive to actually put the thing together, unless you’re focused on that being the ultimate achievement (and its completion should have a commensurate reward). So I agree in part, but application has to be correct.
I think embracing the grind, which you’re alluding to, is essential but buying in to the grind requires a bigger why to begin with, and this is the ultimate goal.
It’s all about how you leverage the scenario but if you lose your why, you’ll lose the rest. It needs to be the carrot, and sometimes you need a stick on your way to it. Cue parents, coaches, trainers et cetera. Someone who can pull you out of yourself while you internalize and progress personally - in achievement of said goal.
A lot of great stuff. Thank you everyone.
For the record, I love him and tell him that often and I don’t think I make it conditional. Am I perfect? Hell no. I tell him I love to watch him swim, good or bad race and that’s the extent of feedback I give. Afterwards, I may suggest he could work harder or practice more, but I’ve never berated him. I don’t really show my emotion often, so seething generally only bothers me (and my wife).
Aside from what others have already said, any advice depends on the goals of you and your child. Age 11 is when I began to notice the “I want to play hockey” kids sorting themselves out. For some, they understood that this meant more and harder work to continue to play into high school and sometimes even beyond.
For others, they understood that they could continue to play hockey without taking it too seriously. That’s the entire purpose of multiple levels of play often being available for sports. In hockey, this meant that by Jr. High the only kids left playing at the highest levels were the ones who wanted to be there and had the talent and dedication to compete at that level. That sill left “house” hockey for available several more years, where everyone gets ice time and playing to win takes a back seat to participation.
This is also when I noticed the adults sorting out their families sports participation. Dragging an 8 year old to a sport they may not want to play in a good faith effort to, say, get them off of the X-Box is one thing. Many parents can and do drag their kids to stuff like that and sometimes it can turn into a sport they enjoy or even a lifelong hobby.
That’s harder to do the older they get, and I’m not so sure dragging a Jr. High kid to a sport they have no interest in playing will be helpful for anyone.
A parent in my neighborhood was mad at the football coach for being a jerk, which he was, and asked me what I thought.
I didn’t know what to say. Our wrestling coaches would literally kick kids off the mat for “playing grab ass”, and if you cheated on push ups you got corrected with a crack from the whistle chord.
I think you have to make him realize the importance of training. As @zecarlo pointed out, you need to model the behavior for him while training together. Swimming being swimming, it’s obvious what needs to happen: Showcase the advantage of superior swimming ability, by catching up to him while swimming and holding him under the water while he struggles, instead of just passing him.
*This obviously assumes you can currently out swim him. If you can’t out swim him and he’s also losing to other children, you may want to let him either just enjoy the sport or find something else.
I think creating some motivating goal beyond the competition itself is key. Fuck points and winning, you need a REASON to do it. When I swam I wanted girls in swimsuits and to be a Navy Seal. Cross country was practicing for the AT. Rock climbing was to become spiderman. My motivation to do well had to be something to carry on, post an arbitrary victory.
So let them try as many things as possible until something clicks. Once that happens you’ll be left in the dust.
As a father of a (so far) pretty successful 15 year old athlete, I can confidently say that the best way to turn your child into an emotional wreck is being emotionally invested into their failures (not successes, failures). If your kid is 11 and loses a race, in my opinion the best response is “Hey, it’s only sport. Let’s get some ice cream”. Now, if your kid discovers on his own the casual relationship between their training effort and sporting success, then it’s it’s an extremely valuable life lesson that has to be paired with the liberating realization that, at that age, failure is an option.
Whenever I feel like I’m about to get worked up over my kid’s sporting performance, I read back-to-back these two newspaper articles that are 17 years apart. An emotionally invested mother results in sporting success but also assault, battery and burglary down the line.
Her mother is always there, as close to Martina Hingis’s side as her racquet bag. She is there for every match, almost every meal and nearly every plane trip.
So what teen-ager wouldn’t be yelling, ‘‘I need my space!’’ by now? What 15-year-old wouldn’t be pushing her mom away like one pizza slice too many? Instead, Hingis starts to smile, even lights up at the mention of her mother. Where’s the rebellion, the angst? It’s nowhere to be found.
The husband of the former Swiss tennis champion, Martina Hingis, claims he had to flee to France to escape his estranged wife and her mother, saying they assaulted him, tried to steal his car and threatened by text message to ‘set the Russians on him’. Molitor’s boyfriend Mario Widmer also hit him in the head with a DVD player, Hutin claimed.
I think @twojarslave is on the right page. What’s your son’s motivation for swimming? Does he want to win/compete or is he there to have fun? If he’s just there to have fun you just need to accept that, disconnect from what you perceive success to be, and reconnect with what constitutes success for him. If he’s complaining about not winning and wants to do better then it’s time to have the “Winners have to do X” talk with him.
I used to be a speed skater when I was younger, but I hatted competing. I just liked skating fast and going to practice. I skated in 3 meets and hated every one. I told my folks and they were cool with me just going to practice.
I really feel that many youth sports focus too much on the competitive aspect, especially for sports that are non-interactive and thus don’t inherently need competition to be performed. My daughter does gymnastics and enjoys it a lot. The competitions, however, are a huge investment of time and resources that doesn’t really seem to deliver much value for most athletes. At times, it feels very scammy and scummy.
I’ve never had a kid in gymnastics or cheering, but they both do seem to be a little scammy and scummy. No first hand knowledge of them, but it seems as though there’s a very profitable industry built up around those sports.
Youth hockey in Maine was an overall great experience for my kid in no small part to having different levels of play available, starting pretty early on at age 7 or so. It was also expensive, but nothing I’d consider unreasonable when you factor in the equipment and ice time costs. Nobody seems to be getting rich off of youth hockey in Maine.
“House” hockey has a focus on fun and participation. You still try to improve at practice and you still try to win the game, but the priority is participation. He played house hockey from age 8 through 11. His last year in house was very frustrating for him because he was working harder than everyone else and winning the games was important to him. He felt like he was carrying his team and he often was.
The answer was moving him to “travel” hockey. There are tryouts. You may not get as much ice time. The goal of every game is to win. The goal of every practice is to improve. Fun and participation still happened, but it happened with common goals of improving at hockey. He also went from being the stud of the team to 2nd line defense, which was also good for his development as an athlete and a person.
If anything, we probably should have seen this and gotten him into travel hockey a year or two sooner. His first two years he definitely belonged in house hockey. It allowed him to develop a baseline set of skills and build confidence in his abilities without being out-classed by the kids who’ve been skating since they can walk and spend every summer in Canada or Minnesota at hockey camp.
He went on to make the very competitive high school program where a majority of kids who tried out were cut. He also had an offer to play Jr. Hockey in New Hampshire after graduating. I don’t think that would have happened for him without different tiers of play being available.
