How to Healthily Encourage your Kid to Love Sports

With obesity rates skyrocketing in today’s society, participation in sports activities is decreasing. Getting your kids to love sports can sometimes be a challenge if they don’t seem interested. It’s important to support your child in their interests growing up, however, there are a couple ways you can direct them towards loving healthy athletic activities without forcing them into it. 

Starting Young  

If you want your child to love sports, get her started young. That means signing her up for little league baseball and peewee soccer leagues, or playing with her on the home basketball court. If you introduce your child to sports at a young age, she has a higher chance of enjoying them. 

Avoid Burn Out

While starting children in sports at a young age is a good idea, there is such thing as “burning them out” early, so avoid signing your child up for every sport possible for every season and making them practice on the home basketball court all the time. 

Playing sports year round from age five on can be exhausting for a child, burning her out before she even makes it to high school. This can have the opposite affect on your child, causing her to hate sports for consuming so much of her time. 

Let Them Chose

It’s common to want your kids to get involved in sports and enjoy them, but which sports do you chose? Well, if you want your child to love sports you should let her chose. At a young age, this might be tough because kids have no idea what they want, but it’s important to be open to your kid trying different sports and listening to her opinion. 

Often there are obvious signs your child will show if she hates a sport. Investing in a home basketball court could be a great way to make her fall in love with sports and figure out which one she enjoys the most. 

Don’t Force it 

This is one parents struggle with. If you force your child into anything she doesn’t want to do, she will never love it. Wanting to play sports because you chose to is what loving sports is all about. It’s important that you’re encouraging and supportive but never forceful. Encourage your child to play on the home basketball court by joining her and making it fun. Kids just want to have fun and play with friends—and if that’s how sports are portrayed they will fall in love with it in no time. 

Alyssa Koenig is an athletics writer for Fusion 360, an SEO and content marketing agency. Information provided by Sport Court. Follow on Twitter.