Want to be a good swim parent? Stick to these simple guidelines.
- Love your child unconditionally and do not make it seem like your love for them is in any way related to their performance.
- Make sure they have plenty of good food options available.
- Make sure they have reliable and on-time transportation to and from swimming activities.
- Teach and encourage your children how to advocate for themselves and communicate with their coaches.
- Celebrate their actions and effort as much as, if not more than their results.
Pretty simple right? Nothing controversial in there. Got it. Check, check, check, check, check.
Then why do so many of us screw this up? Yours truly included at times.
Let’s take a look.
As parents, we have a lot of strong emotions when it comes to our children. We want to keep them safe; we want to prepare them for life, we want to see them succeed, we want them to be happy, and we want them to feel proud of accomplishing big things. These are all good things.
We invest a lot of time as swim parents. There’s the driving back and forth to practice, the travel meets, the non-travel meets that still take up an entire weekend. There’s just a lot, but also good things.
There are some bad things that get mixed in there as well. There is the trap of seeing our children’s success as validation of our parenting success. There is the subconscious “parental competition”, where we get some satisfaction out of our children accomplishing more than another. To make it worse, all of this is unfortunately made easier by easy access to results and social media for broadcasting it wide. These things are not so good, even if the intent seems valid.
So, you mix in a lot of well-intended, strong emotions and a huge time investment with some easy to fall into negative actions then layer in some technology as a catalyst and we find ourselves involved way, way, way beyond the simple five rules of swim parenting.
I get it. It’s a slippery slope where the first step is usually taken with the best of intentions to support our children. Before you know it, you’ve slid into crazy swim parent territory with spreadsheets, reminders of what they need to do in each race, and a kitchen table reviews of their turns and splits. That’s why I call it simple but difficult.
From a coaching perspective, I see nothing more damaging to a swimmer’s growth, development, and love for the sport than a parent who is over engaged or over involved. That’s sounds like hyperbole, but it is 100% the truth. You can see the pressure on their faces, and they spend their energy thinking about pleasing, or rather not disappointing, mom and/or dad rather than having fun and be happy with doing their best.
From a swim parent perspective, I’ve learned through many mistakes that the best approach is to mostly keep my mouth shut, remember they already have a coach, and I have five really, really important things to do as a parent (see 1-5 above in case you forgot).
Understand the simple, acknowledge the difficulty, recover from mistakes and good luck.