*** Os pais precisam se lembrar que seus filhos ainda são crianças. ***
Jo Durie, a former world No 4 and a commentator for Eurosport, tells The Tennis Space ’How to avoid being a nightmare parent’:
The first thing parents have got to remember is that their son or daughter is still a CHILD.
Their children are playing a sport because they love it, it’s a game. They have to keep perspective and many parents see their child playing but it becomes all-encompassing on the win or the loss aspect.
After a match they should give their child a hug and ask if they tried their hardest and whether or not they had fun. Don’t ask them if they’ve won or lost, that’s for them to do and not for you to get involved in. The one thing for parents nowadays and didn’t happen so much in my day is that they’re ferrying their kids around from here to there and it’s taking up hours of their day. When the match starts, they’ve done all this for their child and they feel very engaged in the whole thing and want an outcome because of the amount of time they’ve put into it. But the fact is it’s your child who wanted to play tennis in the first place, not you. So you have to let them get on with it. A child has to learn discipline, tactics, technique and it all doesn’t come at once.
Recognise that your child is not a mini pro at the age of nine. I think a lot of parents think their child is a mini pro at the age of nine but they’re not, they are just a child. It’s hard for parents to see this and me and my coach Alan Jones have seen this hundreds of times but the parents have only seen it one time and they have nothing to judge it by.
Trust your child’s coach. Parents probably see people on the pro circuit such as Wozniacki’s father and think that they are going to be doing this too. But you need to trust the coach. I see far too many parents moving their child from coach to coach but you need to trust somebody and build a relationship with somebody so your child has trust. At the end of the day the coach knows what they are doing and you need to trust that person.
Don’t put pressure on your child to win a match – think more about performances than results. A parent genuinely thinks they are doing the right thing for their child but to put added pressure on their child when they’re trying to learn a sport is wrong. I never felt this as a child. I played tennis because I loved it. What I see too much of at an early age is the win and loss and you need to get past that. You need to look for performance and where it’s leading in the future; otherwise your child will never be any good. Honestly they won’t. Your child should like to play an attacking pro-active tennis because once you get to 17 or 18 and you don’t have an attacking game then you probably aren’t going anywhere.
I’ll give you a good example. Laura Robson, who was with us at 11 or 12, played under-12 nationals and lost in the second round and I think the back fence had holes in it at the end of the match. She was just hitting balls into the back fence but we could see where that was leading. We could see that at 17-18 that kind of tennis would be good on the Tour. You could see it a mile off. If you watch other players who are playing junior tennis, you can plainly see also that that isn’t going to get anywhere. For parents, you got to be courageous yourself and see it’s not all about winning at the age of 12; it’s about where your tennis is going to lead and whether your child is enjoying learning about tennis. There are just so many pitfalls I’ve seen time and again.
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