Sports To Help Children Make Friends}

Submitted by: Christine Dunbar

Sports have always been one of the effective means of building friendships amongst children. It is easy to become friends with other kids who have the same practice schedule and must learn to work as a team. With a coach to guide them they learn to trust each other and rely on the strengths of the group as a whole. This trust and time spent together often turns into long term friendships.

Children learn that others count on them and that if they continue to work together that the team gets better. This often leads to groups of children practicing on their own and becoming even closer. You can see teams who have a good chemistry and get along better. They often win more games, have lots of happy children, and lots of ice cream outings with the coach and teammates.

This is not always true and in some cases whole teams get along great and may still lose games. Friendships really get built when this happens.

Children look to their friends even more when times are tough and who better to discuss your teams loss with than your team. It is a right of summer to see two best friends in the local park pitching a baseball back and forth. These practice sessions become a part of the kids lives. They might know more about the kid they are throwing too then they do about their family. Almost everything you could want to learn in being a friend can be learned in sports.

Sports teach some of the most basic ideas of friendship. Sharing, accountability, generosity, sacrifice, and communication are all learned playing sports. When you join a team for the first time you must learn to accept and define boundaries and still work together for a common goal. This working together helps mold us into good friends later in life. Children grow so much in just one season of athletics. As your child matures and maybe decides playing sports is not for him or her sports can still be a part of their lives.

Most high schools have a team assistant or two. For most schools they are students who don’t play sports but still enjoy the close knit sports outings. Cheerleaders and the school band often all show up to high school games bringing large groups of children together for a common cause. This can spawn friendships between different groups of children who might not see much of each other normally.

One more friendship that often develops from sports is the one between the coach and the kids. Kids learn so much of how to act from the coach that he becomes a mentor. In pro sports you always hear guys thanking that special childhood coach who taught them to be good teammates and good people in general. These are often the first times a child forms a bond with adult other then family members. And in the best cases the coach is a players father and this builds a close and lifelong friendship even more.

About the Author: Christine enjoys writing about a variety of topics. For more information about a

childrens gym

, visit The Little Gym.

Source:

isnare.com

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