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Melanie Johnson M.A.'s blog

Controlling Your Inner Coach

So now that baseball is in "full swing" I have mixed emotions as a parent.  My younger two sons decided after a family meeting not to play as we agreed that football and basketball were enough for the year.  We would do some one-on-one instruction to help the 11-year- old pitch better, and for my 8-year-old, just playing catch in the backyard would have to do. 

A single mom realizes the need to control her inner coach when she finds herself caught in the age-old battle of the sexes with her son's baseball coach, feeling a need to compete with the coaches for no other reason than they are men and because she had a hard time resisting the thought that, in the back of their minds, they think she is clueless about how to teach her boys how to do the hard stuff like pitching and quarterbacking,

Can The Adrenaline Rush From Sports Become An Addiction?

We have all met people with so-called “Type A” personalities: driven, competitive people who believe they can do a better job at work, coaches who believes that their way is the only way, and live to prove it on the field, the court, or the stadium, and, yes, sports parents who are determined to prove that their child is the next sports superstar.  What motivates such people is a need which can become addictive, so much so that there are those who suggest that adrenaline/epinephrine addiction should be considered in the DSM (the manual classifying mental disorders) as an addiction, alongside addiction to illegal drugs. 

Having pushed our children's need to compete and win -and the surge of adrenaline it creates - parents create a craving which makes it hard, when the season is over, for young athletes to slow down and relax. Worse, we may be raising children for an unhappy future, when the wins they achieved in sports are not an everyday occurrence, for a life in which they end up always searching to re-live their “glory days”, and kids who haven't developed an appreciation for small victories and the simple pleasure of relaxation.
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