As your child gets back to school, especially if they’re going to high school for the first time, then a whole lot of new opportunities are going to open up for them in the year ahead. One such opportunity is the chance to get involved with school sports. If your child is interested in joining a team or getting involved in sports somehow, there’s a lot you can do to encourage them. Here, we’re going to look at why you should do just that.
It’s great for them physically
One of the best benefits of doing sports at high school is that it can get kids to develop habits for a healthy lifestyle good and early. Regular, routine practice sessions, and being incentivized to stay active even outside of the team’s practice sessions can help growing teenagers get a good feel for exercise. It can teach habits that are otherwise often difficult for kids to learn alone.
It builds bonds
Children tend to find friends wherever they fall in and spend most of their time at school. If you want to make sure that your child has the opportunity to develop good relationships with other teens their age and are making new friends, then building bonds with their teammates is a good way to do just that.
It gives them something to belong to
Teenagers can develop all sorts of questions and thoughts about their identity and where they belong, which can lead to no shortage of existential angst. Joining a sports team can alleviate a lot of that, whether it’s through the bonds they develop with teammates, or even something as simple as wearing a custom rugby kit that shows the world they’re part of a team. It can help them feel like they’re playing a role in something greater than themselves.
It teaches valuable life skills
If you believe that your teen’s time at school should be about more than academic achievement alone, then team sports can help with that to a great degree. They teach excellent time management skills for those who are able to ensure that they fit their responsibility to the team amongst their responsibilities to their education, they help kids learn how to communicate effectively and confidently and also teach the important skill of giving and taking feedback.
It’s better for their academic career
You might think that having sports as a distraction might prove to be detrimental to your child’s performance in school, but all of the research done on the subject shows the opposite. Most teenagers who are involved in sports end up doing better in core subjects. Whether this is because of the development of key traits for success that sports allows for, or because exercise is simply good for your brain as well as the rest of you is hard to say.
Involvement in school sports is good for a child’s physical, mental, and emotional development. You just have to make sure that you’re there to guide them through it, and that their coach has their head in the right place, too.
The Coastal Mummy 