The Elementary School Years (6-12)

The Elementary School Years (6-12): Building Competencies, Exploring Interests and Making Friends

In this article, the authors focus on the elementary years and the importance of our children building competencies, exploring interests and making friends.

Studies show that children who play organized sports reap profound benefits. They get more exercise, they enjoy a healthier lifestyle, consuming more fruits and vegetables, and are less likely to smoke cigarettes, use drugs or engage in early sexual activity (for girls only, that is). It is crucial that, as partners, we ensure that our children enjoy physical activity, take pride in caring for their bodies, and desire to continue in an active lifestyle. As parents, our first priority is our children’s health; therefore, we need to invest time, energy and thought to help them adopt a lifestyle that will allow them to stay fit for life.

Organized competitive youth sports begin in earnest at ages 6-12. At this age, most of us who are currently parents were first introduced to sports through Little League baseball or girls’ softball, Pop Warner football, youth basketball, hockey, soccer or perhaps competitive swimming or tennis. The phenomenon of youth sports has exploded during our lifetime; almost nine out of ten children will play in an organized sports league before the age of 13.

Essential Skills for Children ages 6-12
Kids ages 6-12 learn to make and keep friends, and they develop a wide range of skills as well. Good friends, good grades and good play are the goals kids aged 6-12 should strive for as they make further progress in the following six essential skills:

Confidence: Sports make children face and overcome fear, anxiety, and frustration regularly, and this experience can help build their confidence. Unfortunately, a pattern of bad athletic experiences can result in a lifelong sense of inferiority and diminished self esteem, and too much of a good thing can also undermine balanced physical and psychological growth. Sports-oriented parents need to remember that music, art, friendships and schoolwork are equally compelling arenas for the development of confidence.

Interests: Having a wide range of interests is a marker of healthy development at this age. Avoiding specialization in a single activity or sport is wise during the elementary school years. Encourage multiple interests, and you will likely have the rewarding experience of seeing your child express surprise or wonder at enjoying something that you have urged him or her to try!

Relationships: Making and keeping friends is a major focus for children of ages 6-12, as significant as school is, and certainly more important than the number of sports trophies they may win. Friendships build on the trust learned in relationships with parents and sets the stage for moving beyond the egocentrism of childhood toward the capacity for mature love. Making and sustaining good friendships and good relationships with teammates require the ability to accept limits in oneself and others. Team sports are a great vehicle for learning to tolerate and accommodate people’s varied needs, strengths and weaknesses. Parents and coaches of children in this age group must seize the “teachable moments” that reveal how to be a good teammate and friend.

Judgement: At this age, children are moving to a less egocentric view of the world. Not until the age of 12, however, can children accurately understand what caused them to perform well or badly on a given occasion, the tendency to see things as all or none, black or white is still prevalent, especially for ages 6-10, producing a poor outcome means the same thing as being a bad player. Struggling youth athletes can be prone to making sweeping, unjustified generalizations about their abilities. Also, children ages 6-12 are very sensitive to what parents think about them, so we need to be aware of messages we may be unconsciously telegraphing through tone of voice or facial expressions. By age 12, our kids should be able to make basic moral judgments of right and wrong. They should also evidence a growing capacity for distinguishing good friends from troublemakers, adults who can be trusted from those who can’t, and safe situations from those that might cause trouble.

Emotional Control: Participating in athletic activities can create emotional highs and lows, sports competition can bring out the worst in parents, coaches and kids. When adults lose control of their emotions, they give children tacit approval for bad behavior. Sometimes, sensitive, high-achieving kids will protect their parents from the emotional difficulties they experience. This is especially true for 11-12 year-old girls and for boys and girls in families facing emotional turmoil such as parental illness, divorce or job loss. Younger girls may mask their feelings because of being both biologically wired and culturally conditioned to be more sensitive to the emotional needs of others than to their own needs. As parents, we need to state early and often that no matter what else is happening, our children should follow this rule, which we first heard from Dr. Paul Rauch, the head of the MGH Child Psyschiatry Consultation Services: DO NOT SUFFER ALONE. If something is bothering you, make sure you come to Mom, Dad or someone else who we agree is a responsible person.

Sports–Related Skills: Tremendous growth and variation characterize boys and girls of this age; marked differences in height and weight of the sexes are established by the end of this state. And although basic competencies in many sports can be skillfully mastered by some youth athletes, even the most gifted have not fully matured physically. What is the proper athletic focus for children in this age range? Rather than work to beat the other guy, the best athletes should compete against themselves to bring out their best. According to Jim Thompson and his Positive Coaching Alliance, the “scoreboard mentality” of youth sports should be replaced with the “mastery approach.” Instead of planning to win at any cost, the emphasis shifts to improving skill through effort and learning proper technique. Mistakes are seen as a valuable part of the learning process, rather than a setback in the grand cause of scoring a victory.

Useful Tips:

Encourage children not to suffer alone
Preserve a balance between organized sports and free, unstructured play
Create and preserve quiet time each week, ideally at least 20 minutes a day, at least three times a week (no TV or video games!). It lets children practice calming themselves.
Create positive post-game rituals to avoid critical analysis. Nothing kills a child’s joy in sports more than negativity and criticism.
It is never too early to help your children practice or play at their best and compete hard – while following the family code of behavior. Focus on praise instances in which children persevere, overcome adversity or demonstrate discipline, courage, responsibility, camaraderie and good sportsmanship.

Red Flags:

Over scheduling, over specialization, and over emphasis on sports performance, as opposed to the development of the whole child threaten to burn out our kids. By the need of this age range, a great many children will drop out of their team or sport. Some children just lose interest and “move on,” but others leave because they “are no longer having fun
Adults make a big mistake. We impress adult standards of performance on youngsters who are still developing. The professional motto of the NFL Team Oakland Raiders “just win baby” sets a poor standard for children. Further, parents and other adults can make the mistake of seeing child and adolescent development as predictable, a series of uniform steps. However, some kids grow gradually and some seem to sprout overnight; their athletic skills also may grow and level off in unpredictable ways. When adults display disappointment at children’s failure to live up to unreasonable of uniformed expectations, they instill in kids a sense of failure. Adults unrealistic expectations of child athletes also pose physical risks.
Orthopedic experts adamantly warn us that growing bones are vulnerable to repetitive-use injuries, such as those caused by too many serves in tennis. Over emphasis on sports, particularly specializing in one sport, as a path toward guaranteed high school or collegiate success is dangerous – physical and emotional fallout could be serious.