The Parents’ Optimum Zone: Measuring and optimising parental engagement in youth sport

Both Sport England, through its Long Term Athlete Development programme, and the NSPCC, through its Child Protection in Sport Unit, have a stake in improving parental behaviour in youth sport in order to optimise the safety and performance potential of young athletes. This paper reports on a commissioned review of parenting research literature and programmes by these two agencies in 2005. The outcome is a new model of parenting termed POZ (Parental Optimum Zone) that draws from previous research, in particular that on Activation States (Brackenridge et al., 2005) and Hanin’s (1995) notion of the Individual Zone of Optimum Function (or IZOF) for athletes. The model seeks to identify the optimum discourses, knowledge, feelings and behaviours that parents should demonstrate in their engagement in their child’s sport. Adopting this framework, and listening to children’s views of it, will allow us to describe when parents are ‘in the zone’ and help them to adopt POZitive voices, knowledge, attitudes and action towards their child’s sport. POZ synthesis several previous models and offers both a method of diagnosing and monitoring parent behaviour and a platform for parent education