The Upper Valley has sports for every taste. Take your pick of indoors or outdoors, individual or team, elite competition or ordinary recreation. Most parents believe that sports help children thrive — and there’s lots of evidence that speaks to those benefits.

Sports provide physical exercise and get kids away from screens. They build physical strength, endurance and coordination. They also build mental strength, with lessons of discipline, frustration tolerance, self-control and performance under stress. They can even boost cognitive performance and creativity.

Connecting children with peers, they teach teamwork and sportsmanship. Working with a coach, children learn from another adult whose style might differ from yours.

Plus, sports can be fun: In an ideal world, children would participate in sports every season of the year.

But then reality sets in. Parents balance competing demands. Racing from practices to games to tournaments — maybe for multiple children in multiple sports — strains every family member. Some weekends, you probably want time for yourself. But that’s rare in family life, and you do want to do right by your child. Expectations for good parenting exhaust you. You’re trapped in endless competition, striving to be the greatest parent of the greatest child.

I’m exaggerating, but not by much.

Responsible parenting is a complex, demanding and thankless job. So remember that it’s your privilege and responsibility to set realistic boundaries for the family — and that includes you. If you’re realistic up front about the time and money available for sports, it’s easier to make a manageable plan.

Some parents give kids options. Your child might pick a sport you’d never pursue; that’s part of her becoming her own person. If your child is sports-reluctant, you might say your family’s value is to try one for the season. If your child complains that a friend gets more sports, you can explain that every family is different. In protecting your family’s limits, you’re showing confidence that disappointments can be handled and people can survive inequities.

Then, with a plan in place, you’ll have chances to model discipline. It’s easy to leave the house for sports when it’s sunny. But when it’s cloudy and your kid wants to rest, you’ve got work to do — the work of teaching commitment: “We signed up for six weeks. We’re sticking with our plan.”

Your discipline strengthens your and your child’s emotional muscle. Emotional muscle is the mental ability to manage tensions, frustrations, disappointments and the temptation to sink into ease.

It might seem trivial, but staying the course is a great gift to your child. Children need us to be realistic and follow through. Maybe if you remember the value of a simple steady commitment, you’ll take some of the pressure off yourself.

Tell humbling sport stories about yourself. Kids relax when they hear about their parents’ early foibles. Maybe you wet yourself at your first soccer practice — or scored a goal for the opposing team. Honest stories, told with good humor, reassure your child that you remember being scared, confused and small. Mortification, you’re saying, is not a mortal wound; nor must you banish anxiety. Quite the opposite: Properly dosed, anxiety is a useful, manageable part of being human. You’re relaxing the family atmosphere.

Sports do impose competitive pressure and put your child’s self-esteem on the line. It’s heartbreaking to watch his hopes crash when he tumbles and loses the race. It’s time to talk with your child about self-esteem. There are many ways to feel good about ourselves. One is beating a rival. It’s elating. But that strategy is momentary. New rivals always emerge.

Self-esteem grows in other ways, too. When we help another person, we feel good about our kindness. Feeling understood and loved fortifies self-esteem. It also grows as our talents get recognized. Maybe we can make others laugh. Or ski with graceful form.

But the strongest, most enduring tonic for self-esteem is knowing we’ve worked hard and grown stronger, that we’re advancing in the competition with ourselves. Dispensing “good job” indiscriminately doesn’t work, but recognizing honest effort and real improvement does.

And remember that your child’s self-pride is the most reliable engine of success. “You must be proud that you did all those drills,” you can say. “Now you’ve got the hang of it. Look at you go.”

Maybe your child would enjoy making a graph with you, a visual aid to track their growth. Whatever approach you use, your child builds their own self-esteem by recognizing that over the long haul — despite ups and downs — hard work leads to growth. And remember that strength, coordination and stamina, acquired in youth, makes a solid foundation for a lifetime of both hard work and recreation.

Just make sure you all get time to chill, too!

Miriam Voran consults with parents and practices psychoanalytic psychotherapy with children and adults in West Lebanon and Montpelier. She is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. She lives in West Lebanon and can be reached at Miriam.j.voran@dartmouth.edu.

Resources

For the research, see: Benefits of Youth Sports, developed by the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness and Nutrition Science Board: https://odphp.health.gov/sites/default/files/2020-09/YSS_Report_OnePager_2020-08-31_web.pdf.