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Youth sports also help parents

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By JEANNINE STEIN

Los Angeles Times

Published: September 19, 2009

Organized youth sports can be great for kids, since it teaches them sportsmanship, discipline and the importance of staying in shape.

But they're not the only ones who benefit - parents do, too, according to a new study that discovered team sports offer a number of advantages for moms and dads.

Researchers from the department of health and kinesiology at Purdue University in Indiana conducted focus groups with 26 parents of children ages 6 to 15 who were involved in youth sports to see the effects of their participation.

Parents changed in numerous ways, it turns out. One of the most notable was that their kids' involvement in sports prompted them to become active, too. One woman said, "My littlest wants to play tennis, so (I) go out and play tennis now, and I never would have done that."

While parents often had to schlep their kids to and from practices and games and sit and wait while they played, it wasn't all for naught: Some parents found it helped them adopt time management strategies.

The study appears in the August issue of the Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology.

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