How parents and coaches can help children thrive on the pitch. Image / AI-generated
While few parents harbour hopes of their children becoming professional athletes, they want their kids to enjoy the physical and social benefits which sport can bring.
Yet any parent trying to encourage their child on the field can be overwhelmed by a deluge of contradictory advice. Anecdotes, from other parents, teachers and family members, can confuse more than clarify.
Fortunately, sports science provides tangible evidence-based research on how children can get better at sport.
Here are five areas that can shape how parents and coaches think about sport – and help children thrive on the pitch.
The temptation to cram children’s free time with coaching can be inescapable. And yet, for all the value of formal training, even more important is what happens away from adults’ eyes. Parents must let children learn for themselves.
An analysis compared Germany’s 2014 World Cup winners with Bundesliga players who did not play for the national team; and players from the fourth to sixth tiers. Remarkably, the future World Cup winners played less formal football all the way up to the age of 22. But they played significantly more unstructured football in their teens. The future world champions had learned more for themselves, rather than following coaches’ instructions.
Similarly, a recent analysis compared Premier League academy players who were offered three-year scholarships aged 16; and those released at 16. These two groups had accumulated an identical number of hours in the academies. Instead, the difference between the two groups lay outside formal training. Players offered scholarships had played an average of nine hours each week of football informally with their friends, compared with five hours for those released.
Informal play develops a child’s intrinsic motivation and joy for sport. In friendly games in parks or on street corners, children are driven solely by fun, rather than a need to appease their parents.
An abundance of informal play also harnesses children’s skill development. Games are played in smaller areas, and the number of players per side is fewer, so each player gets more touches than in school games with more players. Children are exposed to playing with older and stronger players and are free to experiment, fail and learn.
“Street sport develops skill learning and creativity,” explains Mark Williams from Loughborough University’s School of Sport, Health and Exercise. With the number of players and the opponents changing constantly, players are always responding to new information.
“Street football means you fear no one because you have nothing to lose,” explained Aston Villa and England’s Jadon Sancho, a product of the concrete pitches of south London, which is now English football’s greatest talent hotspot. “Everyone just expresses themselves, and that’s how people learn their skills.”
Players who play more unstructured football have been shown to possess superior game intelligence – the ability to anticipate and make good decisions under pressure. Letting children simply play, away from intrusive adults, can imbue them with perhaps an athlete’s most essential trait: to think for themselves.
Parents whose children thrive at one sport swiftly encounter a question: should they specialise, and focus all their energies on one game?
Children who specialise will have more time to focus on that sport. For coaches focused on trying to win in the short term, it can be tempting to push their best players to ditch other games.
These calls should be ignored. Coaches who pressurise a child to specialise are prioritising their short-term interests over the child’s long-term well-being.
There is a powerful ethical argument against forcing children to specialise early. Specialising prematurely can destroy the enjoyment of playing sport and damage a child’s mental health. Children pushed to specialise early are more likely to suffer burnout and to quit playing altogether.
Specialisation heightens injury risks. Early specialisers are 2.25 times more likely to suffer overuse injuries than those who play a range of sports, a major study found. Neeru Jayanthi, the lead author of the paper, outlines two simple rules to tell if a young athlete is at heightened risk of injury. First, when their number of formal hours of training a week exceeds their age. Secondly, when more than two-thirds of their weekly sport is organised training, leaving less time for informal play.
Specialising later gives a child the best chance of picking the sport which is genuinely the best fit – rather than the one best for their physique at a particular moment. A child might ultimately be best suited to being a fast bowler in cricket, but only realise this when they have had a late growth spurt.
Rather than sports being in competition with each other for children’s time, games are better thought of as in concert with each other. Playing one sport can improve a child’s performance at another, seemingly unrelated, game. This truth is ignored by those who dogmatically push the debunked “10,000-hour rule”, a theory that 10,000 hours of practice are needed to achieve expert-level mastery in any field.
Playing a range of sports can lead to skills cross-pollinating and aid motor development and overall physical competence. Jannik Sinner’s first sporting love was not tennis but skiing; aged 11, he was a national slalom runner-up. Novak Djokovic, another proficient skier, attributes his slide on court to the slopes. England rugby star Henry Pollock honed his fitness through triathlon and swimming, only specialising aged 18.
For the most athletic children, playing a range of sports can build transferable mental qualities. Australia batsman Steve Smith credits tennis with honing his problem-solving.
Specialising later does not just help children enjoy a more normal childhood; the approach is also more conducive to developing elite athletes.
A British study compared gold medallists at the Olympics or World Championships with athletes who did not reach these heights. The future gold medallists spent more time playing other sports as children, and were more likely to play three sports regularly, aged 15, than those less successful. Similarly, in Denmark, the best athletes did significantly less weekly practice in their eventual professional sport than near-elite athletes until after they were 15, and only later caught up.
These results are affirming. Parents do not have to choose between a balanced childhood and giving their children the best chance to fulfil their potential.
Sixty-eight million pounds ($156.16m): that is how much it cost Arsenal to rectify a mistake they made 14 years ago. Last month, they signed Eberechi Eze from Crystal Palace, a player they had released as a 13-year-old. Eze cried in his room for a week after. Three years later, Eze was released by Fulham, too.
Eze’s qualities were easily overlooked, for two reasons. First, he was young for his year: born on June 29. This disadvantage was exacerbated by his slight build; players who were less skilful, but bigger and stronger, could outmuscle him.
Arsenal had already made an even costlier mistake. In 2002, the club released a “chubby” and “not very athletic” 9-year-old from their academy. That boy’s name was Harry Kane.
Kane was released, in part, because Arsenal were wrong to compare him with boys in the same year group. Kane was born on July 28; when he was released, then, some under-9 teammates were over 10% older than him. Even allowing for this, Kane was also a late developer biologically for his age.
“I was small for my age, I was a late maturer,” Kane later said. “It’s hard to tell at that age what the player is going to turn into.”
The stories of Eze and Kane illustrate the Relative Age Effect. School teams are routinely dominated by players born from September to December, the oldest children in the year, with those young for their year under-represented.
Relative Age Effect’s impact persists all the way up to professional sport. There are twice as many English professional men’s footballers born from September to November than from June to August, according to the sports consultancy Twenty-First Group.
In New Zealand, this works in the favour of children born earlier in the year.
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Older players may not have originally been better, accounting for relative age. But older children enjoy extra coaching and match practice, making it ever harder for those younger in their cohort to keep up.
School coaches default to picking the kids who are most developed physically. The approach leaves children who are at least as talented, but later to develop, behind. Too often, parents and coaches mistake a child being young for their year for being bad at sport. The same phenomenon is also true in education: children young for their school year tend to perform worse.
When Venus and Serena Williams played tennis together as children, Venus was hailed as the better player. But Richard Williams, their father, always said Serena – 15 months younger than her sister – would ultimately be the superior player. While Venus won seven grand slams, Serena won 23.
What was true of the Williams sisters is true of sport in general: younger siblings tend to be better. A major study of Western countries found that, on average, elite athletes have 1.04 older siblings; non-elite athletes have 0.6 older siblings. When multiple siblings become professional, the younger ones enjoy more successful careers in about two out of three cases. The two most exciting teenagers in English cricket today – Farhan Ahmed and Thomas Rew – both have older brothers already thriving in the professional game.
The little sibling effect encapsulates how children improve at sport. Playing with older siblings forces children to develop faster. Younger children cannot outrun or outmuscle their older siblings, so they need to develop skills to keep up. The experience of playing with older siblings also instils tenacity and competitiveness.
While younger siblings have a significant advantage, parents can help to ensure that all children – including first-borns and only children – benefit from a similar environment. “Playing up” has been shown to accelerate skill development, just as Serena Williams found.
If a child finds playing too easy, they will not develop as much as if they are challenged more. To improve, children benefit from being pushed to play with those who are older, and better, than they are.
The concept of the optimal challenge point – the sweet spot at which athletes learn skills at the fastest rate – was developed by scientists Mark Guadagnoli and Tim Lee. “If someone has more success than about 70–75% of the time during practice, they’re probably not being stressed appropriately,” Guadagnoli has explained. Essentially, athletes learn far more when they fail regularly.
Without such an environment, early maturing children will initially thrive. Yet eventually, they risk being overtaken by later developers who can now match their physiques, but were forced to develop broader skills or tactical sense to compensate for their early lack of physical maturity.
Rather than allow a player to be all-dominant in a particular age group, the child is best served by playing with older players. They will succeed less in the short term – but improve more in the long term.
This concept has been perfected by New Zealand Rugby, which has an enlightened approach to help early and late developers alike. While some junior matches are between players of the same age, others are between teams grouped by weight, so bigger players cannot rely on their strength alone. A similarly fluid model in schools would give children experience of both being among the oldest and youngest in teams.
To watch any school match is to be reminded of a simple truth: parents tend to be far more competitive than their children. The phenomenon is not new. But such overbearing parenting is increasingly common, partly because the rewards for excelling at sport – scholarships to elite private schools or American universities, and even lucrative professional careers – have soared.
Helicopter parenting – a term used to describe a style of excessively involved parenting – can undermine how much children enjoy sport. Pressure from parents has been linked with children suffering from higher anxiety, reduced self-esteem and self-confidence. Overly pushy parenting is also more likely to lead to children quitting sport prematurely.
Helicopter parenting can drive children to enjoy short-term success. But in the long term, helicopter parenting is not conducive to children fulfilling their potential. When parents are more hyper-engaged with their children’s sporting development, children have been shown to be less inclined to practise independently, especially the informal play that can be particularly formative.
A study in 2016, led by the performance psychologist Dave Collins, compared British “super champions” with “almosts”. The study identified salient differences in the parenting styles of the two sets of parents.
While the parents of super champions often made huge personal sacrifices to help their kids’ sporting careers, they were more inclined for their children to think for themselves. When discussing matches, these parents focused on asking questions, rather than telling their children what to do.
The parents of almosts were far more consumed by their child’s sporting careers. They were more likely to spoil them with all the best equipment or complain to the coach about them not being picked. For the children themselves, the impact could be stultifying.
Young people are more likely to deliver their best on the field, and enjoy the benefits of sport over their lifetime, when they are playing for themselves – not their parents.