Team of Experts

The stories of parents acting out on the sidelines are all too familiar. The problems range from parents yelling at parents, parents verbally abusing referees, to incidents of physical violence between adults. The unfortunate part of this behavior is that not only does it teach children that abuse and violence are ways to solve disagreements, but it constitutes a form of emotional abuse.

Parents and officials never seem to be on the same page. There always seems to be some tension between them. It often seems to parents that the person officiating must be seeing a different game than they are. Every call seems to go against their child's team. But it doesn't have to be that way.

Every parent enjoys that moment when they open up the newspaper and they find a picture of their athlete child accompanied by a story. Hopefully the story is about what a great kid they are and how hard they have worked to achieve their athletic success

his is one challenge from which, I believe, we should not back down if we hope to change how parents behave on the youth sports sidelines. The need for a change in parent behavior is well documented. Simply put, the number of times when parents act inappropriately towards officials, players, coaches and other parents is unacceptably high. Most agree that something must be done, but are unsure whether they want to put in the effort required to change the status quo.

As parents we have a lot to learn about the youth sports our children play. Most of us have not played the game with age appropriate rules and therefore we are learning on the job what our children are doing on the field. Some rules are new to us and, of course, have little in common with the rules we see professional athletes use while we watch them on television.

Each summer, 12-year-old boys are thrust into the spotlight of the Little League World Series. It is a great thrill for most of them to be on TV and have the whole country watch them compete play against the best young baseball players in the world for what is truly a world championship.

One of every three girls and one of every six boys will be victims of sexual abuse by the time they
are 18. One of the places that children are vulnerable is in youth sports. Unfortunately sexual abuse of young players has occurred in youth sports leagues of all kinds, as well as with individual coaches in individual youth sports.

The stresses of sports competition can overwhelm the coping skills of parents increasingly led by our winner-take-all society to believe that a child who fails at sports will fail as an adult. Given an environment in which survival virtually requires parents to become overly focused on and invested in their children's success in sports it is no wonder so many act out in inappropriate ways.

Since it simply isn't possible to shield our children completely from bad coaches, when we feel that we have something to say, no matter how unpopular, we should speak up. If your intuition is to speak, speak. There is no dishonor in voicing an opinion; there is no dishonor in trying to protect your child.

Each day between 70 and 100 e-mails are sent, redirected or forwarded to me. I try to read, file, redirect or forward each one by the end of the day. The majority of these are directly related to producing our New Media site. Many are press releases, from non-profit organizations to pharmaceutical companies, asking us to plug "the first-over the counter dye-free liquid pain reliever, to publishers with a new book release, and so on.