latimes.com - Health - Sporting behavior
Parents who obsess about children's athletics are a growing -- and potentially troublesome -- phenomenon. One therapist's advice: Get a life.
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Taylor spent time with the father and learned that he was unhappy with his marriage and bored with his job. Under the guise of helping the daughter's skating, he was masking his own inner pain. "All parents love their kids," says Taylor, "but some are misguided."
Not long ago, this kind of behavior was practically unheard of among parents of kids who play youth sports. Today, psychologists and coaches agree that many parents have become more passionate — obsessed, in some cases — about their children's athletic pursuits than mothers and fathers of the past.
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It's natural to feel pride when your child hits a home run or scores a goal, or sadness when his or her team loses, says Dr. Ian Tofler, a Los Angeles psychiatrist. Tofler, coauthor (with Theresa Foy DiGeronimo) of "Keeping Your Kids Out Front Without Kicking Them From Behind," says it's healthy for parents to identify and empathize with sons or daughters, even to live vicariously through their exploits.
However, explains Tofler, trouble starts when parents rely on their child's athletic success to boost their own self-esteem or fulfill other personal needs and aspirations.
"When your own identity becomes caught up in the child's performance, that's a clear red flag," says Tofler. "The child becomes more a means to the parent's end than a separate individual with his or her own needs and goals."
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Parents who are too emotionally invested in their children's athletic careers may also need to examine whether their obsession is replacing an inner void. "The No. 1 piece of advice I give to parents is 'Get a life,' " says Taylor. "Parents need to have something in their life other than their kid that gives them meaning, satisfaction and happiness."
I don't know if this is a new phenomenon. I think this kind of thing was going on back in the 1970s, it's just that nobody thought of it as a psychological problem as such - people who weren't like that just considered those parents to be plain weird & ridiculous.
I remember my mother making reference to parents like that, and saying things along the lines of, "They live vicariously through their children because they have nothing else in their life or didn't accomplish what they wanted to do themselves." And my mother was not a psychologist. It's just a logical deduction.
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superficiality >>If the facade is what's important to you, all you wind up with is an illusion. Disillusionment is the gift of substance.
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