Brent Eastwood: The questions to ask yourself about children’s sport

Kids doing a variety of activities and sports is one way to mitigate the risks of overuse injuries and overtraining syndrome. Photo / 123rf

OPINION

In my last article we looked at the first three questions posed by Sport NZ that parents of children who play sport should ask themselves to ensure they have the skills and knowledge that will provide their child (and themselves) with a positive experience this winter.

Parents play a key role their children’s sporting experiences, and it gives them the ability to have a massive contribution to how much children enjoy the sports they play. Following are the last two questions that might help parents use their role to make winter 2023 a great sports season:

Do I know the signs of, and how to mitigate, overuse injury and overtraining syndrome?

For motivated and aspirational young athletes, there is often the risk they will want to do lots (and sometimes too much) of a sport. When your child wants to do an activity they love, understandably, it is hard to say no.

One suggestion for parents of children who want to do lots of one sport is to actively encourage them to do other types of activities and sports in an informal setting. Variety of activities and sports is one way to mitigate the risks of overuse injuries and overtraining syndrome.

Overtraining syndrome, as it sounds, is simply doing more than the body can recover from — often to the point of declining performance and potential injury. A rough rule of thumb is that a young person is overtraining if the number of hours they spend doing training and competing in a given week is more than their age. Parents should use this number as a bit of a risk radar — that is, as the number of training and competition hours a young person participates in gets nearer to the upper threshold, parents should increase their monitoring for signs of overtraining.

These signs include decreased performance in sport and/or school, chronic muscle or joint pain, rapid weight loss, mood swings, fatigue, lack of enthusiasm or change in motivation, sleep change, decreased appetite and increased injuries, illness or infections.

Parents are best placed to look out for these symptoms. Ideally, even before any symptoms occur, parents should have a conversation with their child’s coach about how much training and competition load their child is doing.

Parents should also be aware that young people with multiple coaches are at greater risk of overuse injuries and overtraining syndrome because the different coaches often don’t know how other sessions are impacting an individual young person. If your child has several coaches, it might be beneficial to share your child’s training and competition schedule with all their coaches.

How will I ensure that my child’s sport is safe, fair and inclusive?

There are a lot of factors that can threaten the integrity of youth sport and make it less safe, less fun and less fair for young people. Issues like child protection, avoiding harassment, and dealing with complaints aren’t just for club administrators or national bodies — they’re things everyone involved with young people in sport should know about.

For parents, knowing what good practice looks like for safeguarding young people is important. Likewise, so is being able to direct coaches and organisations towards resources so they can develop their own good practice to safeguard young people. That’s why Sport NZ has created a Community Guidance Portal. This features information, policy and procedure templates and e-learning modules to support you in dealing with all matters of integrity. These resources are free and suitable for individuals and organisations from grassroots to national bodies. They can be found at www.sportnz.org.nz