Sport was always considered to be an important part of human life. But there always were as many opinions as people. Thus, Stacy Aguilar once said “The important thing is not winning, it’s making everyone else lose”. Frankly speaking, this idea sounds a little bit cynical and rude, especially in modern society when we tend to express more tolerance and respect to other people, at the mean time trying to achieve good results. As any Olympic winner began his way to victory from the early childhood, it is important to find out how do sport games influence children?
The point under consideration is how important are sport games in childhood and are they necessary and obligatory or is it just an opportunity to have fun during one’s leisure time?
With the development of human society sport has become an inseparable part of everyone’s life. It does not matter if one practices the professional sport or does rare morning exercises. People are involved in sports because they understand that it is a good way to be healthy and slim. This only reason in many cases motivates them to make their children play sport games. However, numerous researches had revealed that not all the children express the same willingness to play sports their parents want them to do. Here appears contradiction in child and grown-up perception and understanding which if it is not resolved can lead to serious psychological trauma and hatred to sport at all.
Your children play sports to have fun and to fulfill their needs to socialize, work with teammates, try out new skills and grow. Your children are there to be true to their own sense of self, not yours (Bigelow, p.16).
Because of the perception of the environment stipulated by the peculiarities of physical and psychological development in early years, young children are interested in everything that makes them have fun. That is why in order to make children be involved in any kind of sports adults should not force them to make it. Forcing leads to confrontation and conflict. No good result is possible when using only rude method of forcing. As the saying goes, “you can take a horse to the water but you can not make him drink”.
However, there is another approach that allows to make sport games obligatory for children and at the mean time interesting for them. It is motivation. Organizing sport games in an unusual and interesting way and presenting additional motivation to be involved in any kind of sports has a bigger effect on children than the simple necessity.
While teaching the will to win does not have to be eliminated, coaches, athletic administrators, and others in sport leadership positions must re-evaluate their philosophy regarding the importance of winning as it relates to character development particularly when the participants are children and young adults (p. 98).
We can make a forecast that children who were motivated but not forced to play sport games would appreciate more sport as the inseparable process in their lives and would achieve not only good results in playing games but in future as well. According to Maslow’s pyramid, people need appreciation of their actions as well as they need food, water or air. Children need appreciation more. That is why motivation is the best way of influence on the children.
Investigating the question of necessity to involve children to sport games we are fully agree with those coaches, scientists and psychologists who insist on sport as an obligatory point of children’s upbringing. Except the widely known facts that sport games help to keep fit, improve muscular activity, strengthen immune system, increase organism activity, etc. they help to develop social skills and trait characters so needed in modern society life.
Coaches and parents involved with sports that possess positive character traits will help create an environment wherein youth can develop proper character traits. Furthermore, organized sports are supposed to be a setting that encourages cooperation with others and a willingness to accept society’s rules (Delaney, p.107)
This idea outlines that sport games are required to be played by children. Any sport game has its rules as well as the goal to achieve. Thus, children playing a sport game together have to cooperate with each other, support each other and try their best in order to achieve a good common result. Once having been taught to play sport game in a childhood by fulfilling the rules and achieving a good result those children will be able to define tasks in adult life, divide efforts and responsibilities and resolve any problem in a best way. Also loss while competition in a sport game would help children to learn to accept difficulties and face with problems in future.
In conclusion in accordance to all said above I would like to emphasize that sport games are required to be played by children. Sport games have a great impact not only on the children’s health by developing physical skills needed in everyday life. Sport games also help to develop good character traits such as cooperation, courage, believing in oneself, ability to support, team work, etc. Nothing else like sports can make such a help in children’s upbringing.
Speaking about the obligatory nature of sport for children I would like to say that sport game should be in life of every child. But in order children could be fond of it and play sport games with pleasure adults and coaches should care that any sport event they propose to children would be interesting and could bring a lot of fun for them. In this case children would be eager to play sports, achieve good results and develop traits of character so needed in grown-up life.