Parental strategies for supporting children’s psychosocial development within and beyond elite sport
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There remains limited research into the role that parents play to support their child’s psychosocial development within elite youth sport contexts. The present study was conducted in an English professional youth football (soccer) academy that has intentionally integrated the 5Cs framework (Harwood; commitment, communication, concentration, control, confidence) into its player development process. The purpose of the study was to explore parents’ interpretations of their roles and experiences of supporting young athletes’ psychosocial development in this context. Six focus groups were conducted with 30 parents (17 fathers, 13 mothers; Mage = 44.8) who had a child in the foundation (8–11 years) or youth development phase (12–16 years). The transcripts were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. Parental strategies employed to support their child’s 5Cs within and beyond the academy included providing encouragement and tailoring feedback, establishing and sharing expectations with their child, creating an autonomy-supportive environment, encouraging participation in activities outside of the academy, and understanding football and the nature of the academy. Barriers perceived as hindering parents’ support reflected the salience of coach-parent communication at the academy. Accompanying recommendations and implications are discussed for enabling improved congruency between coaches and parents, and how parent education can be better tailored to support intentional psychosocial development within elite youth sport pathways.Lay summary: Conducted at a professional football academy that has integrated a psychosocial framework into the player development process, this study explored parents’ interpretations of their roles and experiences of supporting young athletes’ psychosocial development. Parents discussed practical strategies, barriers, and recommendations to support their child’s development in and beyond sport.IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICEParents can support young athletes’ psychosocial development by considering the broader contexts in which they occupy, including how they communicate at home, how they control their emotions within their sport programs, and how they demonstrate commitment at school.When parents employ an intentional approach to supporting psychosocial development, young athletes may become more aware of the possibilities for transferring their psychosocial skills beyond football, or their immediate sport context.Strengthening the communication between parents and coaches within a sport program, and the education offered to parents and coaches, can help sport parents better support their child’s psychosocial development within and beyond the sport program.Engagement with a parent 5C program can provide parents with a meaningful return on their time in academy football to not only support their child but to help them navigate the known demands of being a parent in an elite youth sport environment.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".