6 Environmental Factors for Creating Ideal Growth Environment for Your Children
- Personal Motivation and Vision
- Exposure to Skills Learning
- Social Group
- Mentors and Coaches
- Rewards
- Ease of Play
Children’s development is a very fascinating and much talked-about passion at TAC Sports. Coming from backgrounds in Kinesiology and Sports Psychology studies, we often ask ourselves, “Why do some players develop more rapidly than others?”, and “why do some children get a head start over others, regardless of social standing, body composition and logistics?”. The answer was usually found at the heart of a family, the parents.
Parents who are fully supportive and on board with their children’s development offer their children a much higher chance of reaching their full potential. Many athletes, from Wayne Gretzky, to Michael Jordan, to Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo had parents that we’re informed, knowledgeable, and, above all, supportive of their children’s development.
Parents have arguably the most important role in their children’s development. As a parent, you are largely in control of your child’s environment and have more contact with them than anyone else in their lives.
We at TAC Sports have commenced a ‘Parent Knowledge Initiative’ to get parents on board with their children’s development and making sure that they understand the factors that go into the development of their children.
We think of your child’s development as being driven by a team. We want to join forces with parents as we all strive to help your children unlock their full potential and form a super team for your child.
With this in mind, let’s begin to outline the 6 environmental factors that parents can control to create the ideal learning environment for their children!
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Vision and Intrinsic Motivation
The number one key factors in a child’s development is their understanding of the future vision for their development and unlocking their intrinsic motivation to practice and improve.
Getting a child to understand the vision and the positive effects is easy. This has been achieved in many steps.
I am going to outline two easy steps below for showing a vision for your child:
- Be the Vision of a Successful, Active Athlete: The first thing you can do as a parent to unlock this passion for sports and for physical activity is to show children how good the sport can be by playing the sport with your children. Parents who have athletic backgrounds can do this. Even by participating, you give your children a good model to follow in pursuing sports.
- TV and Youtube Clips of the Top Performers in Sports: For the parents, like my own, who were not top performers in sport, the second thing I would recommend is limited and purposeful viewing of the top performers in the sport that you want your children to develop in. An hour a week of watching Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, Lebron James, Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic and your children will be understanding the vision and begging to practice.
Intrinsic Motivation: Once the children have understood the vision and the benefits of achieving greater skills in sports they will have intrinsic motivation and want to start practicing on their own. We find the most successful athletes in our programs are the ones who truly want to be in the NBA, want to be professional soccer players, or want to be on the pro-tennis circuit.
Motivation Meter: A great indicator of passion is if your child will actively pursue practice by themselves without a prescribed structure for more than 2 times per week in a specific sport.
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Exposure to Skills Learning
The second biggest environmental factor is one that you’ve already been doing well! Exposing students to skills learning is a huge factor in their development. We are starting the initiative to inform more parents about our 5 Star Development System, which outlines skills for each sport and sorts them into levels. It is our aim to get you, the parents, on board to the specific skills that their children need to learn for each level.
We will be sending out specific videos on each of the skills per level and want parents to get involved in learning the names and how the skills look themselves.
Once a parent understands the skills, and the child is exposed repeatedly to the skills, the student will be much better situated to learn the skill over time.
Please ask us or order your Members Manual V1_5 or Sticker Book for the Holiday Camps!
We even have Free Slow Motion Video Skill capture for the holiday camps available! We will capture the skills in slow motion and show you how the skills evolve over the course of the camp!
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Social Group
This will be a short one. It is key to have a great social group for your children and surround them with children who are also passionate in sports development.
To beat over the head an oft-mentioned adage:
“We are the average of the 5 people we are most around”.
If we want our children to develop, they must be around motivated, kind, development driven children and friends!
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Mentors and Coaches
It is key to have a coach and mentor for your child. We at TAC Sports endeavour for our coaches to be Mentors for your children and to give them a great model to follow up on.
Our coaches are always free to offer advice on the full range of topics to the children, often having gone through our own trials and tribulations, victories and happiness in our own athletic development.
Feel free to reach out to a coach at any time!
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Rewards
It is pivotal to have great rewards for the right actions in our lives. At TAC Sports we have set up our Sticker books and Achievement development system to release that almighty aid in development – Dopamine.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter in our body associated with happiness. When we achieve and feel good about something, it is dopamine being released that makes us feel that way. We move towards pleasure and away from pain, and therefore will move towards that which feels great!
It is therefore pivotal to have the greatest rewards, such as parental praise, hugs, kisses, and celebratory meals with the family, set aside for children when they achieve something in their development.
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Ease of Play
In the cold Canadian winter, the ease of playing sports decreases dramatically. Due to the cold and the precipitation and snow, it becomes difficult to have a pick-up game of soccer, or go out for a quick rally or to shoot some hoops with your son and daughter. It is key to do two things:
- Find as many indoor programs as possible: In addition to our Camps and Development programs, we are also offering free playing sessions at a reduced price that will have space for children to come and drop in and play at any time.
- Find alternate winter activities to do: It is key to have alternate Winter Activities to do such as skiiing, skating, swimming and playing outdoor hockey. These alternate activities can help the children develop their musculature and stay active despite not having huge opportunity to practice their winter sports.
Parents are the beginning, the middle and the end, the cornerstone of influence and development for your children. We look forward to continuing to work together with parents to achieve the best development for your child!
-Alexander Arthur, Director of Programming and Adib Razavi, Director of Operations
