Sports Can Benefit Children, Research Paper Example

Each parent is responsible for his or her child’s well-being and happiness. By taking the responsibility for bringing up a child, parents also take the responsibility for the future consequences of their actions and educational methods applied. Every single day parents are dealing with the number of problems such as child’s lack of responsibility and discipline, laziness, inability to perform team tasks and lack of communication skills. Health problems are always at hand as well. Surprisingly, solution to all the mentioned problems can be found if all parents recognize and acknowledge the benefits that participating in sports can bring into their children’s lives. In the present paper I will refer to numerous facts and statements that the modern researches present us with, and that prove the significance and usefulness of sports practicing in our everyday life.

Playing sports provide children with more than just physical advantages. Sports normally aid kids to achieve good academic and social performances as well. Nowadays, parents are to realize that children who participate in organized sports perform better in school, develop better communicational skills, and are more team oriented. Moreover, they are normally much healthier than those of their peers who avoid being involved in sport games and similar activities. In fact participation in sports presents the children with the chance for leadership, teaching them how to develop skills necessary for dealing with successes and failures.  By doing sports and participating actively in team games children are provided with socialization so important at the age when personality is in the process of forming.

The significance of physical activity such as team sports is now as undeniable as ever due to the sad statistics telling that nowadays growing numbers of children are getting obese. This statistic is something alarming to hear taking into account the fact that number of overweight adolescents in America has almost tripled in the past 20 years. A number of untimely diseases that children suffer from the early age are the part of contemporary reality. Is it normal that a girl of ten suffers from obesity? Do we really have to accept the situation when an overweight child grows into an obese adult, and eventually suffer from a range of connected illnesses such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes, stroke, several types of cancer, and osteoarthritis? Why not to prevent your one and only child from suffering from problems that can truly spoil his/her future adult life? Look at the seventeen-year boys and girls that have to deal with interiority complexes and constant lack of self-confidence? Are they truly happy? Do they not regret avoiding sport activities in childhood? What would they do now to attain a beautiful, physically fit and healthy body? And while they suffer from consequences of sedentary lifestyle, individuals that participate in team sports burn calories by exercising, being able to both prevent and fight any weight problems that may be current.

Besides bearing physical benefits, participating in team sports is also conductive to mental well-being of the children. Parents should become conscious of the psychological benefits coming from enrolling child into a team sport that he or she takes pleasure in. If asking their children what they expect to gain from playing sports the parents would probably hear something like “To have fun”, “To make new friends/to spent time with old ones”, “To win or accomplish something”. The fact is that besides all this aspects of playing sports, children also enjoy learning and improving their skills, they learn to appreciate being in good physical shape. By participating and succeeding in sports, kids obtain the benefits they seek for. In addition to directing their energy to activities that are fun and useful, they gain what they want so hard and lack so badly: attention and admiration. No need to say, kids have few ways to get respect in everyday life. Sports present the children with opportunities to earn both attention and respect. By exercising their natural abilities, by making use of such indispensable physical aspects of young organism as speed, strength, imagination, coordination, vision, and reaction, children perform well at sports and get the admiration they strive for.

Furthermore, sport games create the models of lifelike situations in which children have to operate and to be successful. When playing sports, children learn what the rules are and how the rules actually work. They learn to be organized by observing how a team needs to follow rules in order to keep order and to perform successfully. A child realizes that he/she needs to accept and follow the set rules for the benefit of the whole group, and that rules involve a concern about the rights of other participants of the game. Children also learn what the competition is, yet in a safe way that minimizes the consequences of failure and makes the participants of competition act in a restricted system, thus preventing them from displays of baseness and anger.

Next, if having a daughter, the parents have to be familiar with specific benefits that sports have for girls. The organizations researching the impact of sport in humans’ life present information reporting that participating in sports result in a large number of developmental benefits for girls. Those include considerable experiences of skills’ application and success; growing self-respect and self-confidence resulting from a nicer and healthier body image; decreased danger of chronic disease. Moreover, young females involved in sport activities perform better at school, and have lower dropout rates than those who do not participate in sports activities. It is also believed that sports benefit girls by preventing them from becoming pregnant teenagers and from starting smoking at young age. Quite the contrary, the research proposes that sports help young females to quit smoking, they are more probable to do well in science and to graduate from educational establishments than female non-athletes. Female athletes also take larger pleasure in their physical and social activities than their inactive peers do. By being more physically active and by keeping up a good physical shape, they are less liable to suffer from depression. There are also some facts proving that entertaining physical activity reduces a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer and helps to avoid osteoporosis.

It is important for parents to know that sports activities provide children with exceptional opportunities to achieve success and to make use of their talents. In being determined to perform productively and to achieve high results, children are engaged into activities harmoniously combining social, cognitive, and psychological aspects. Sports provide children with the possibilities of regular communication with their peer groups as well as with their peers’ families. In other words, sports present children with the exciting, enjoyable, gratifying way of self-realization through participating in a larger world that sedative young people cannot normally enter into.

To be more specific, doing sports provide children, and thus their parents, with three groups of benefits. These are physical benefits, personal benefits and social benefits. When talking about physical benefits, we surely mean health improvement. Through participating in sports children naturally develop general physical fitness. By maintaining a good body shape and by experiencing a growing appreciation of a good-look an athletic body provides, children acquire lasting habits for good physical health. It is also well-known that sports are conductive to relieving stress; sport activities help children to remove the academic and social strain and to get rid of the pressure accumulated in the body muscles. Furthermore, participation in sports contributes to increasing attentiveness to one’s body, to its reactions and responds to various factors and situations, and thus prevents an individual from subjecting his or her body to health risks by becoming drug or alcohol addicted. Valuing the health of own body is something sport normally teach a child to do, and that is something truly important for the development of healthy habits.

Next, if talking about personal benefits the sports can bring we normally refer to the impact the participation in sports have on a child’s life and mental health. First of all, sports develop self-discipline and the understanding of the importance of efforts made because children can observe the differences in results achieved. Sports also teach the children to deal with disappointments resulting from misfortune. They naturally acquire a skill of being tough and becoming strong, happy, and successful again after experiencing a difficult situation or failure. Moreover, children learn to control their attitude, becoming aware of the influence it have on their performance. They learn to be leaders, to reinforce the specific values for the whole team, to resolve the conflicts and to be an example to others. Young athletes learn how to deal with their time schedule in the most efficient way possible; they learn to realize that good time management is a guarantee of productivity. Eventually, they learn to plan ahead and not to waste time on useless activities, which results in better performance at school. Finally, children realize that sacrifice of an instant satisfaction may eventually result in long-term success, and thus they learn a fundamental law of long-term thinking, which can eventually become a basis of personal success.

As a final point, when talking about social benefits, we are referring to the improvement of communicational skills that sports result in. While participating in sport games, children develop relationship with other members of team. Operating in a team, they learn how the collaboration, companionship, friendship and satisfaction of common interest work. Working in team children realize their responsibility to their teammates, and thus learn what responsibility is in general. Moreover, sports can become a significant factor making everyone equal to each other. It becomes irrelevant whether a team player is rich or poor, black, brown, or white. Children learn to understand that what is truly important is talent and heart. Through communication with coach and parents, sports also help children to develop relationship with adults. Finally, sports cultivate in children a sense of belonging to something bigger them themselves. Children learn to be a part of community, which presents them with a possibility to feel that they are contributing to a greater group and greater benefit.

As a conclusion I need to mention that benefits and satisfactions resulting from setting and achieving goals in sports are countless. Naturally there are as well some deficits associated with youths sports, yet their number is noticeably smaller and comparatively insignificant. Taking into consideration the benefits I have mentioned in the present paper, I believe parents to be obliged to encourage their children to be involved in some type of sport. While the general perspective of the sport can differ significantly, the fact that mere operating in the team and exercising physically can lay the foundation for your child leading a happier, healthier life is indisputable. The physical and psychological benefits related with doing sports are plainly too evident to be ignored.