Parental stressors in professional youth football academies: a qualitative investigation of specialising stage parents
By C. Harwood, A. Drew, Camilla J. Knight. 2010
115 citations recorded by the source corpus.
In order to improve our understanding of parental experiences in elite youth sport, the present study investigated parental stressors within the context of professional football (i.e. soccer) academies in Great Britain. Focusing upon the specialising stage of athlete development, a total of 41 parents attended six focus groups exploring their experiences of stressors during the early and later phases of the specialising stage. A hierarchical thematic content analysis led to four dimensions of parental stressor: academy processes and quality of communication, match‐related factors, sport‐family role conflict and school support and education issues. Parents across the entire specialising phase identified uncertainty of their son's retention in the academy and quality of communication with staff as significant ongoing stressors. Unfamiliar coaching and match practices emerged as stressors for early stage parents, whereas the management of school and academy demands was most prominent for later stage parents. Their experiences suggested that the management of parents' expectations for their child in an academy and the ability for a professional club to communicate its ‘developmental’ and ‘non‐developmental’ practices might be central to parental support and well‐being. Strategic implications for practitioners, coaches and organisations are presented with these findings in mind.
Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Orthopedics and Sports Medicine, Social Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/08d225c6e82744368c4c7a9246a944fe8654c313
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In Developmental and Educational Psychology
In Orthopedics and Sports Medicine
In Social Psychology
Citations in the corpus
- Examining the Development Environments of Elite English Football Academies: The Players' Perspective (2014, background): “In light of the suggestion that the intensive journey of an academy player is mirrored by an equally demanding journey for their parents [30], these workshops could play a key function in parental development by also acting as an organised forum for parents to share their experiences.”
- Parenting in youth sport: A position paper on parenting expertise. (2015, background): “Organizational conflict also 21 extended to sport-school relations due to lack of school support when training and 22 competition affected school attendance (Harwood et al., 2010).”
- Parenting experiences in elite youth football: a phenomenological study (2014, background): “…sport, where the parent and 94 coach role may commonly overlap (Dorsch et al., 2009; Wiersma & Fifer, 2008), parents in 95 elite sport settings also experienced stress from a perceived lack of feedback, communication 96 and respect from coaches (Harwood et al., 2010; Harwood & Knight, 2009a).”