Competitive sport has taught my daughter much. Here are some lessons for parents too

My 12-year-old daughter decided to quit rhythmic gymnastics recently, a sport she had trained at least four times a week, three to four hours per session, since the age of seven.

She started in it as a co-curricular activity and then was part of the school team. She has competed in local and international competitions. She was due to compete in this year’s national championships had Covid-19 not disrupted all plans, sporting or otherwise.

The long and short of it is, by the end of the circuit breaker, she decided that she had other interests to pursue.

I am okay with that. I respect her decision.

She has already gained so much in these last five years — resilience, grit, perseverance, determination and friendships.

Saturday mornings were particularly tough for her, having to drag herself out of bed for hours of gruelling physical training, despite training just the night before.

Even on family holidays, she had to maintain her flexibility by stretching in the hotel room daily. She learnt to finish as much of her homework as possible in school and in between hours so that she could train.

There is lots more that she has learnt, from shutting out the noise just before stepping onto the competition mat to dealing with the jeering and booing from overly competitive parents of other kids while standing on the podium.

Yes, the kiasu Singaporean parent is still out there and I will come to that.

She has also learnt that though the sport itself may be individual, the effort is not — the medals hanging by her bed are the results of cumulative and collective efforts by her coaches, her sporting friends’ encouragement, and her parents’ time and devotion.

Most of all, she has learnt that when another athlete falls, she goes and comforts them, cheer them on. If your competitor wins, you share that joy with them, even if their victory means your defeat.

After all, what is the value of sports at a young age? Many of us will never go on to professional sporting careers. In fact, many of us do not even maintain the sporting interest even for leisure later in life.

Do we parents in Singapore push our children to sports only for the opportunity to gain admissions to secondary school?

Do we see every dollar and hour spent on training as an investment that must be returned in accolades, certificates and medals?

Must the child have the “potential” in him or her before we, the parent, the school or the club decide to invest time and resources?

Do we only play to win to the exclusion of others? Is the destination more important than the journey?

Certainly no.

If we take such narrow views of any co-curricular activity, be it art, music, or sports, that we must win at all costs, that we must be the best and top of the field, we are setting our children up for failure.

Failure in the school of life.

Often it takes a change of environment to facilitate a change in perspective and that is exactly what happened when I took my children out of school two years ago.

They accompanied me when I undertook a year-long postgraduate programme in Australia.

While overseas, my daughter continued her training Down Under and it was there that we, the sporting parents, really understood what it meant to focus on the journey, not the destination.

There, the sporting community was strong, supportive and encouraging.

We learnt from the community to celebrate the child for her effort, not the results; to nurture the love, not the outcome.

When a gymnast’s hoop rolled off the mat during one competition in Australia, we heard the loudest cheers and shouts of encouragement from parents and spectators as the gymnast ran to retrieve it, louder than at the prize giving ceremony.

A similar incident in Singapore would have elicited shocked gasps and silent judgement from the spectators.

Why the difference in culture? I surmise it’s the costs of training.

It costs thrice as much to train in Singapore than in Australia.

A fellow parent once jokingly lamented that his twin girls’ training fees with one of Singapore’s top coaches were equivalent to a BMW in monthly instalments.

Perhaps it is the high cost of competiting in the sport that has shaped our sporting culture and piled on pressures for results.

But exactly, what do we want to impart to our children?

It is that it is okay and normal to experience failure, but it is not okay to give up.

Manage your child by focusing him or her on the post-competition situation.  By that, I don’t mean imagining that glorious podium moment or the fun post-championship celebrations.

I mean that feeling we all have when we’ve accomplished something — be it writing a difficult essay, composing a song, cooking a simple dish, or completing a marathon.

It is that feeling that we have reached over and beyond our capabilities to complete a task. Part pride, part self-satisfaction, part happiness.

My first question when my daughter returned to the spectator stand after a competition was always: “How do you feel after stepping off the mat?”

As long as her reply was “It’s okay”, I felt that something intangible had been accomplished. Better still if her answer was: “I’m satisfied with myself.”

Never mind if she might have made a complete fool of herself or dropped her apparatus a dozen times. Or scored badly.

If our children have put in their whole-hearted effort in the endeavour, they will feel good even if they have “failed” in the eyes of the world. That feeling is what Singaporeans describe as one that “money cannot buy”.

If you ask me whether there is a sense of failure or tinge of regret in her decision to quit, my answer remains a no.

When competitions were postponed this March and training went online, my daughter simply decided to tell me that this was the end of her rhythmic gymnastics journey.

She was calm and clear and I don’t think she will have regrets as she pursues new interests in and out of sports.

The five years of rhythmic gymnastics training have more than paid off in self-discipline, self-motivation, sporting camaraderie, sense of adventure, the love of trying something new, and the ability to fall and pick herself up.

These are the qualities that will create resilience in our children that will stand them in good stead in the school of hard knocks.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Sharon Seah works in academia and is mother to two girls aged 12 and 10.