Sports and Child Development

There is a widespread belief that doing sport is good for health of children. Therefore, they are increasingly the parents who are betting on sport as a form of leisure time for their children, as they recognize that this conveys a set of values and virtues.


Some researchers in this area call into question the benefits of sports, meaning, sport depends mainly on the lived experience of children. This means not just put the children to attend any sporting activity that they enjoy that same practice but the quality of the practice is most important.


Sports activities can also be very important in hyperactive, handicapped and autistic children, do to the facts that brings them several benefits (balance, motor and social skills, self esteem, etc.)


Benefits of sports

• Exercise, no matter what age, can bring a range of benefits, not only physical, but as mental and social;
• Physically it is known that sport helps to combat obesity, reduce the risk of cardiovascular diseases, strengthens muscles, bones, and joints;
• The psychic level, raises self-esteem of practitioners, as it develops a skill set that did not have before, and improves their physical appearance, and therefore had a better image of themselves;
• Socially, the Sport is assumed as an obvious place to make social ties of friendship, allowing the sharing of feelings and giving the individual the feeling of belonging to a group.

In sport your child can learn:

• The value of health, for sport calls for a healthy lifestyle;
• The value of cooperation, as a team sport only if they reach the goals when all join forces around a common project;
• The value of respect, or recognize that all wrong and that the most important thing is to support colleagues in bad times, so that their colleagues do the same;
• The value of Friendship, because the sport promotes the possibility of making friends;
• The value of justice by refusing unjustified advantages and recognizing the opponent an indispensable element without which there is no competition;
• The value of Multi-culturalism, as in sports, young people share the same space with children of various economic and cultural, contributing to the respect for different cultures;
• The value of the Pledge, because they learn that to achieve a specific objective is required, hard work, effort and dedication, without which they never will be successful;
• The value of defeats. Sport teaches the children understand that life is made of successes and failures, it is important to learn from the failures that arise throughout life.

However to make all this possible, the role of parents is decisive, regarding the respect, that they should present towards the coach, the coach rules and decisions, the games rules, team players, and do not forget to tell the child, that to do sport is a healthy option and an excellent complement to leisure, but the most important thing is to study.