How Parents Can Instill Confidence in Young Tennis Players

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Hi. This is Dr. Patrick Cohn for the Sports Psychology Podcast. Today I have a special guest all the way from Australia. His name is Anthony Rost. He's a registered sports psychologist with the Psychology Board of Australia. He was an all American tennis player at Pepperdine who went on to play doubles professionally and rise to the top 130 in the world. He now works primarily with children, parents and coaches in developing their well being and performance through sport. He's now the director of sportparentsupport.com Very cool site. I've seen it, got some very nice videos on it. And this is a company dedicated to helping parents foster the well being of children through sport participation.

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Anthony, thanks for joining me today.

Thank you, thanks for having me.

So let me start out with some easy questions for you. Today we want to talk about how sports parents, coaches can improve the confidence of their young juniors in tennis. And it's really a big sport here in the US as you're well aware of. Let's start with talking about what are some of the no no's that parents do may be unknowingly sabotaging their kids confidence.

You know very much how much a child believes or has confidence in any situation is going to be, you know, grow out of their past experiences and you know, to a certain point. Changing a child's confidence in the moment is very, very, very hard to do. So you know, by just telling a child believe in themselves or believe in yourself. Then in some ways if the child then is sitting there going but I don't believe in myself at the moment. I don't have these thoughts, these confident thoughts coming through in some way that might be detrimental to the child.

What about some of the things that parents or coaches do after matches? For example, like you know, we know that focusing on mistakes or going over the mistakes that kids make after matches and asking them the why questions, you know, why did you double fault when you had it to you know, five all or something like that. What about some of those behaviors that parents might engage in that can ultimately undermine kids confidence?

If a parent continually points the child's attention to what they're doing wrong and what they're not so good at, then over time, the child will tend to come to focus on those things and that will become more ingrained in their own view of their performance. I guess that's probably the basic one, I would say, after matches for parents and coaches is to communicate that unconditional love, as I said, communicate focusing on the child's strengths as much as possible. Really, really important stuff to do.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, and that's difficult. I know as a tennis parent myself, I know that's difficult to do when you feel like that your child, you know, maybe didn't give a hundred percent effort or maybe wasn't as focused as they can be, you know, where, where maybe they're, they're feeling a little bit tired, not willing to push it, you know, beyond that. Beyond that tired barrier sometimes.

Yeah. And I think too, it's important for parents to, you know, in that case. So I think it's absolutely fine to have, say, behavioural expectations of effort and, you know, that sort of thing. And so for parents putting a lot of time and effort into the child, then those expectations of, you know, what's expected in terms of effort and behaviour and those sort of things are really important. And I definitely encourage that. It's just sort of that fine line of being clear in what's being communicated. If I'm disappointed in the child, then they need to know that's because of their effort, not because of their level of performance or because they didn't do well enough or those sort of things.

I guess very hard, very hard, I think, for kids to separate those two out, as you say, because when they say disapproval, kids, I think they don't know whether it's coming from the performance or they're disapproving of the kid or the person themselves, if you know what I mean. Yeah, yeah, but you want kids, I think in that particular situation that I mentioned, you want kids to be able to take something with them. You want them to be able to focus on something positive. So if they're down in the match and they're outmatched, obviously outmatched, you want them to still come, come away with something like, well, I continued to battle, I continued to focus in the match. I didn't tank the match. I wanted to learn everything I could from this match. And so. And I think those things can lead to kids developing confidence. Even though they may have got beat 6060, you know, they still can come away with their head held high saying that they did some Good things I've seen, you know, where my daughter lost 6 060, but yet there was the effort. There was the effort and there was the battle still there and there was no tanking. And that to me was a real, you know, positive thing that kids can take away from the match.

It sounds like what you're focusing on was really something that was in your daughter's control and that absolutely, that's something that she can take away if she's able to, if that's reinforced and she's, you know, takes that into ongoing matches which is actually going to be helpful for, you know, to grow and increase performance and that sort of thing over time.

Obviously there's so many things that affect kids confidence from the coaches to the parents to the kids own belief systems, right. How the kids process information, how they think, their personality. For example, kids who are perfectionists, we know they tend to be hard on themselves and thus because they're being hard on themselves, aren't as likely to develop that confidence even after a match. They'll look at all the mistakes and what they did wrong even if they won. So what would you say are some other, I don't want to say inborn, but other learned behaviors or mindsets that kids have that no matter how successful they are, no matter how many matches they win, they're going to come away not feeling very confident in themselves just by the way they process information and they assess their performance.

When I think of the difficult things that all kids to a degree experience during tennis, if we're focusing on tennis is, you know, all kids experience fear, all kids experience frustration, all kids experience probably what I would say is like helplessness in that case, if they're getting beaten really easily and it's, you know, when it comes to the confidence and you talk about that perfectionistic aspect and you know, the other big one which we hear a lot about is that generally that fear of failure which we all have and all kids will have and because those sort of experiences are developed as a natural response to playing tennis, but also through all their learned experiences to that point, which have influenced how they process that information, I'd say more so than, you know, trying to change those internal experiences themselves. So rather than expecting that a 12 year old will not, will not be as much of a perfectionist in terms of how they see the situation, you know, if a coach was able to influence maybe playing not so much based on that fear, then they would and they have a better result then that could be a way to develop confidence or If a child was able to see that, you know, that these just to understand that, you know where that their perfectionistic views had grown from their experiences because that would return them to something helpful that they could do which then would lead hopefully to a better performance which in turn will grow that confidence versus trying to influence confidence in the moment, I guess.

Yeah. But I find that Anthony, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, as they say. And often parents are, if they have some perfectionism or if they want things done just right, they often will instill it into their kids. And so then it's very hard to unwind all that because now you have a parent that's reinforcing those perfectionist behaviors. You know, you can't miss shots, you can't double fault, you can't do this, you have to do this. And so often unless you help the parents understand that placing super high expectations on your kid and they're going to internalize those expectations and then, and then thus feel like they can never live up to those expectations, they're going to lose confidence. But my point is that parents have to understand that I think they have to be able to realize how their behavior is affecting their kids. Otherwise they're just, they're just, you know, the perfectionist sports parent is feeding off the perfectionist kid and vice versa.

So how a parent influences the child is often so well learned by the parent that, and it's coming from places from their own childhoods and that sort of thing. So actually to unwind the parenting and get the parent to. What I would say is even when parents understand how they're influencing their child, it often takes more than that. It often takes a parent to do their own reflection on their own lives and that sort of thing to, to see what's actually going on. If we take the example of perfectionism in parents, often that probably stems from their own sense of disapproval when they performed, didn't perform well. And therefore that stems this drive to be perfectionistic and have to perform very well to feel well.

Some good thoughts. So let's just wrap it up with some tips for parents and I want to focus on the post match tips. So we've already talked about. Focus on their belief for confidence. Stay away from picking on the mistakes right after matches. Be careful of placing high expectations on your kid. If you have high expectations for your child, what are some others that you would add to that? Some quick tips for parents post match.

To be empathetic to the child. So really try to explore the child experience so Once again, because we so naturally look at situations through our own eyes, often it's hard for parents, especially in the emotional situations of sport pairing, to stop and actually try to first of all get the child's experience of, of the match and really try to, you know, not only, I think, empathy, it's a combination of considering children's perspective but also then communicating. The parents got to be able to communicate to the child that they understand and they've heard the child's perspective. That would be one and another really, really important one to do would be to. Within those conversations is to encourage children to communicate their own the emotional aspects of the experience, so the internal experiences, so their feelings and their thoughts and that sort of thing. Because what that encourages over time is more of the emotional intelligence where if a child can come to see their own internal experiences and understand what's going on within them in terms of their feelings and their thoughts, then they're more likely over time to develop the ability to regulate and respond more adaptively, I guess, to those experiences in sport. And the final one, I would say, is this could be before or after sport, but just in general, it's incredibly important for parents to normalise those difficult internal experiences. So the fear and the frustration and the helpless sort of feelings when kids are playing other kids who are a lot better than them to normalise and let the kids know that their normal experiences, that everyone feels in those circumstances is incredibly important. Rather than the notion of don't be nervous or don't feel anger, it's natural for us all to feel those emotions in sport. So I would say that's probably the third one I'd encourage parents to do.

Well, great, Anthony. Those are some excellent tips for tennis parents and everybody in sport. You and I could probably talk at great length. I'm sure at some point I want to have you back. I want to talk about the psychology of playing doubles versus singles, since that was kind of your specialty was playing doubles on the tour. So definitely do it again.

Cool. Sounds good.

Okay, I've been speaking Anthony Ross, who's@sportsparentsupport.com.

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