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Guest post by Cindy Price
Most of us parents can appreciate how sports keep kids out of trouble, but the value of having your child involved in baseball can provide them with significant life lessons that may surprise you.
1. Performing Well Under Pressure
One of the pillars of teenage independence is learning good social skills, and reacting well under pressure takes a combination of social skills and training.
Assuming that you’ve gone to a baseball game, you know that it can become a pressure cooker. Going from the first inning, which players which may take casually, the intensity of the game rises as plays are made, bases are stolen, and runs are scored. This pressure can be hard on teens, but with practice and continued exposure, they can learn how to perform well under pressure, which is a valuable skill to take into adulthood.
2. Learning To Take Failure With Grace
More than other sports, baseball can teach teens to take failure with grace. Whether the failure is in the form of a bad pitch, a strike out, or team loss, there are many levels of failure that teens can experience while playing baseball.
If your teen wants to persevere in playing baseball, they must learn how to put these failures in perspective, or they will never manage to stay involved in the sport.
3. Being A Supportive Team Member
Baseball is a highly cooperative sport, almost unlike any other sport in the high level of cooperation it demands of players. Because of the needed coordination between players, your child will learn greater communication skills and how to be a supportive team member, instead of needing to have things be all about them.
In fact, researchers have seen that youth who participate in team sports often develop more significant relationships that cross socioeconomic, race, culture, and other common barriers, as their shared bond as supportive team members teach them to work with others.
4. Developing A Stronger Work Ethic
There are many news stories that hone in on the deterioration of work ethic of the rising generations. To help overcome this, scholars have begun to examine Generation Z to see how these children can be boosted above the flagging motivation of the millennial generation.
One scholar looked at the difference in work ethic between high school student-athletes and non-athletes. High school students who participated in sports, whether they are male or female, had a much more developed work ethic than their peers that did not engage in school sports. So, whether you have a teenage son or daughter or both, participating in a high school sport like baseball can help them develop a stronger work ethic.
5. Separating Work From Personal Life
Learning to separate work from personal life can be something that adults struggle to figure out, but baseball can help your child learn this critical skill.
Think about it. While it is possible that your teen may obsess about a bad play or an unfair call from an umpire, they can’t do that often. Otherwise, baseball can go from an enjoyable sport to a sour, frustrating chore. With your help and the help of your teen’s coach, they will learn to leave baseball on the field and separate their sporting work from their personal life.
6. Dealing With Success
It may sound funny that people need to learn how to handle success, but consider this—those who don’t know how to navigate success can destroy themselves as easily as people who give into failure.
With baseball, even if your child lands the winning grand slam at a close game, baseball is a sport that requires the whole team to pull off a win successfully. So, rather than your child standing alone on a winner’s podium, they learn to build up the entire team with the win.
Another key aspect of success is winning gracefully. While playing baseball, your teen will learn good sportsmanship and how to treat the opposing team after they lose. This lesson easily translates to adult life, where people need to learn how to treat coworkers they have been promoted over, or just behaving well during a simple game night among friends.
Whether you choose to involve your child in baseball to help with their ADHD or for some other reason, you can enjoy the knowledge that your sons or daughters are learning valuable life lessons as they learn to deal with the joys and hardships of the game.
Cindy Price is a mother of three who loves to write about topics related to family, children, and parenthood, especially teens and the issues they face.
