Fathers key to children’s beliefs about their athletic abilities

EDITORS: Father’s Day is June 17.

ANN ARBOR—About one-third of fathers studied by University of Michigan researchers said they coached their children’s sports teams, and one-third also reported that they played sports with their children at least once a week in the last month.

Those are some of the findings from a study of 444 families, forthcoming in the journal Child Development (membership in Society for Research in Child Development needed to view online articles). The study is one of the first to confirm what common sense has long acknowledged: that fathers play a key role in shaping their children’s athletic activities and attitudes.

The adolescents and their families, all from two-parent families, are from a larger sample of seventh-graders from 23 Maryland middle schools. The group is similar to the larger population of U.S. adolescents although their families are somewhat wealthier and better educated.

“We found that specific behaviors by dads, such as shuttling their kids to games, coaching sports teams, going to games, and buying athletic equipment for their children, were really important in how both boys and girls viewed their own athletic abilities,” says lead researcher Kathleen M. Jodl.

Whether mothers actively encouraged a child’s interest in sports made little difference in children’s attitudes about their own athletic abilities, reports Jodl, a psychologist at the U-M Institute for Research on Women and Gender.

More than half of the fathers and more than 30 percent of the mothers surveyed said that they provided at least some support for their child’s sports activities, the researchers found. This support included signing them up for sports, praising them, monitoring their practice, and working with them on athletic skills, in addition to coaching their teams and driving them to practices and games.

Overall, the researchers found that high paternal involvement was linked to both boys’ and girls’ views that sports were important to them and that they did well in sports, compared to other kids.

The researchers also found that paternal involvement predicted a higher likelihood that children, especially boys, aspired to a career in sports. European-American boys in the study were more likely than Blacks to aspire to sports careers, (21 percent versus 12 percent, respectively). Only three percent of girls said they wanted to pursue a career in sports, compared to about half the girls and less than one-third of the boys who said they were interested in professional occupations.

“Despite wanting their ‘space’ from parents, young teens may still benefit when their parents, especially their dads, are actively involved in sports,” Jodl says. In contrast, parental involvement in their children’s academic life is often decreasing in the teen years.

Another U-M study, based on an analysis of the same sample of adolescents and their parents, and presented this month at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Society in Toronto, examined how the father-child relationship affects young adults’ attitudes about intimate relationships. Lead researcher Sharon Risch found that adolescents, especially boys, who reported having a close relationship with their fathers in the 11th grade expressed more positive attitudes about marriage in early adulthood. Risch, whose work won the 2001 Pillsbury Award for outstanding undergraduate research in psychology, graduated from the U-M in April and will attend the University of Tennessee in the fall to pursue a Ph.D. in clinical psychology.

The studies by Jodl and Risch were supported by a grant from the MacArthur Foundation to U-M psychologists Jacquelynne S. Eccles and Arnold Sameroff.

Child DevelopmentInstitute for Research on Women and GenderAmerican Psychological SocietyMacArthur Foundation