Reducing Stress in Middle-Level Adolescent Athletes by Teaching Communication Skills to Parents

This paper focuses on identifying common difficulties for parents in their attempts to encourage and support adolescent athletes who play competitive sports, but are not competing at the highest level, and who have a low likelihood of playing collegiate or professional sports. Often in their desire to support their child, parents can become overly invested in their child\u27s perceived success, leading to internalization of every success and failure. This can commonly result in the parent(s) failing to recognize the needs of the player in the moment, or in later, negative conversations about their performance. As a result, adolescent athletes may experience greater levels of stress and pressure being placed on them by their parents that is unintended but can be very disruptive to the player\u27s self-esteem and anxiety levels when engaging in sport. Upon identifying those common difficulties this paper will establish a tool for teaching parents basic therapeutic techniques to reduce stress in their adolescent