Parents influence a child's tennis.
If there is one group of people who are much maligned in tennis clubs, it is the parents. Whether they are players themselves or not, when they start getting involved in their child's game, a lot can go wrong.
It's not just in tennis that parents are a problem. Things can go wrong away from the court too, and we don't see a lot of this . It happens behind closed doors. We know that parents differ enormously in their attitudes towards their children. Any time you see the child out and about with the parents, you can tell from their body language what is going on. A child might drag his feet, keeping a distance. He might be holding a hand. He might be skipping. He might be chattering, or silent.
As a parent you learn to watch for your child's moods. You know when you can push them, you know when you have to be careful. When a child is hungry or tired, a thing we see most starkly when they are babies, you should give a child some peace. In the heat of the moment, a child doesn't recognise his hunger and fatigue, doesn't know how to take a deep breath when he is not at his best (as adults should know), so he can easily react excessively to a remark. The parent may then also react excessively, because the child would not normally have this behaviour. Things can deteriorate. Anger and suspicion can root itself deeply with children. You never want it to get this bad. You never want it to even start.
Unconditional support
Why is it that tennis creates so many insensitive, unintelligent, parents?
The first group is those who play the game. They may have forgotten how difficult tennis is to learn. It is a one on one game. A child 's weaknesses can be brutally exposed even by a small difference in capabilities. This can be demeaning for the child. He cannot get himself out of the situation. He'd rather run away than face a parent who doesn't understand that the child CAN'T do it. When the child comes off the court, the parents say, never mind, you tried hard, the child is very good at detecting irony or disappointment, even good at detecting a parent who wants to become really furious, but is bottling it up. This is almost as bad as a parent belittling, or berating, a child because he seems to have underperformed.
The second group is those who don't play the game. These may be marginally easier to deal with , since they tend to put less direct pressure on the child. However, their ignorance is also difficult to deal with. A parent who cannot live the ups and downs of a tennis match, transmits and experiences nothing with the child. Tennis becomes an activity JUST for the child. Children are not good at handling tennis stresses on their own. These parents react with indifference often to advice from coaches and club officials. They don't see the particularities of tennis, so they choose to oversee them.
Parents - head of a unit
If you are a mother or father you may underestimate your role when your child starts playing tennis. Learning tennis can be a very traumatic experience, and, for any traumatic experience that happens to a child, the way that the closest people around him interract with him is key. Just so that we don't over-state the trauma, I also insist that winning is a sort of traumatic experience. A lot of children, and adults, don't handle winning well.
Ideally, a parent should decide, by any activity in his child's childhood, to stay close to that child while he is doing that activity. He should inform himself about that activity, the personalities around the child, and how the child reacts, every step of the way. Instead we have many many parents who use tennis schools as a crèche, dumping the children off on the coach on time, picking them up ontime, but doing something else during the session. These are children who typically stop playing tennis after at best a couple of years. Their development goes nowhere, and better-supported children overtake them. A child knows when he's going nowhere.
