The good, the bad, the ugly of sports parents

BALTIMORE (Map, News) - Anyone who has watched much youth sports knows a psycho parent — a father or mother out of control over a referee's whistle, a coach's substitution or their own kid's mistake.

Most of us have seen at least one crazed parent evicted from a sideline and at least one child shamed to tears by the atrocious comment of a relative.

And some of us — maybe more than care to admit it — have felt our own temperature rise during a child's sporting event.

We're not alone.

Sideline rage is not a phenomenon limited to futbol hooligans. A University of Maryland researcher discovered quite a bit of it on the youth soccer circuit, and he didn't travel far from the College Park campus for his data.

“There is an undercurrent of anger out there,” said Jay Goldstein, who studied soccer parents' emotions in the Washington suburbs.

Goldstein found some interesting similarities between sideline rage and road rage. If you get overly annoyed on the road, he said, “the odds are you are the type of parent who is going to get angry when they watch their child play.”

They feel like they are being dissed.

The problem is the reaction to the dissing. I might scrunch my face when my kids get knocked over on the soccer field, but I'm not lambasting the ref for a no-call or cursing the 12-year-old who didn't get carded.

Goldstein found that parents with control-centered personalities are more likely to rage on the sidelines. It's the same findings other researchers discovered about raging drivers. In both cases, the rage is a result of taking things too personally.

He embarked on the study after years of helping organize youth soccer tournaments. Although most parents behaved responsively on the sidelines, Goldstein could hear “venom rising above the cacophony of cheers.” Then, in a game of 14-year-old boys, after an aggressive slide tackle, he saw the worst of parental behavior. A mother hit the opposing player.

“This was a woman who was an upstanding professional who just lost it,” he said. Asked why, she responded sadly: “I’m sorry. My dog died yesterday.”

Goldstein had reviewed tons of research about how to be a good coach, and he had read plenty of studies on fan misbehavior, mostly focused on the professional and collegiate level. “There was nothing on how to be a good [youth sports] parent,” he said.

And so for his master’s thesis, Goldstein surveyed 340 parents at soccer games in the Washington area during 2004. A pre-game survey identified them as control- or autonomy-oriented. A post-game survey measured anger “from mild irritation to intense fury and rage.”

I've seen parents who might have punched him just for asking about anger.

I've seen parents of 10-year-olds enraged by a coach's decision to put equal playing time above winning. I've seen parents scream at every single call against their children's team. I've seen parents blast their own children for a team's loss.

Goldstein called his findings the good, the bad and the ugly. The good news is that most parents reported only brief and controllable anger. The bad news is that more than half the parents admitted to some level of sideline anger. Since parents were self-reporting, he suspects the number was higher.

For the angry, “the child was an extension of themselves, their ego, their sense of self-worth,” he said. “The research shows that anybody can fall into this trap if they take it too seriously.”

It wasn't surprising, he said, that a third of those surveyed directed anger at a referee. But more than a fourth were angry with their own child or their child's team, a finding he considered more troubling than surprising.

The ugliest issue raised by the research is how parents' sideline behavior can affect their own children. He hopes to do further research in that area and give parents more reason to control themselves.

Goldstein, whose 4-year-old daughter is just starting to play soccer, offered suggestions for quelling the emotional roller coaster. One of his favorites is lollipop distribution, a method also recommended by many teams in the National Capital Soccer League and the Washington Area Girls Soccer league. Not only do lollipops keep the mouth busy, he said, but they remind fans that these sports should be accepted as childs’ play.

He also suggested yogalike stretches, calming mantras or controlled breathing, things less likely to develop a following at the games I attend. But they are far better than a sad trend developing among parents who can’t bear their own sideline behavior: They just stop coming to their kids’ games.

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