There is few things I hate more than pushy parents. I've had a go at soccer Dads' more than once. The worst offenders I've seen are Ballet Mums - they should be shot! My parents got us into various activities and then left us to it, providing support when needed. I think it crosses over into real life - I motivated and drove myself to learn an instrument as a teenager, and now I motivate and drive myself to be successful at work.

I bet there is a whole generation of kids who won't know how to push themselves, and will need to be constatly told what to do. Woe to their employers!

Good comment regarding the 'stage parent' syndrome. I started taking part in women's triathlons and duathlons 3 years ago. Doing the event yourself is the best way to encourage your kids to enter their own race.

Oh how very true. As a mum to a young kid I see it constantly at athletics, and to a lesser extent even at swimming lessons. Thankfully they are outweighed by the the parents who just encourage the kids, but why is the the pushy ones are the loudest??!! I haven't turned into one of the 'serious' parents, no chance of that when my daughter is more concerned about not stepping on the daisies during her races than actually running....

It's a tough one - having had my mother along as support/cheering squad at my short triathlons (Triwoman etc), I couldn't tell whether she was screaming or not. She'd ask whether I heard her, my answer was always no. I was focussed on not tripping over someone & everyone else was yelling just as loud.

There's probably a couple of subsets there - the kids who do other sports & know that this is just how mum or dad acts on Saturday morning at netball/rubgy/soccer etc, and then the kids who are trying something that's meant to be low-key & fun for the first time. The second group would probably be put off to discover their parent turns into a competitive spectator & will either not enter again or disown /ignore the parent. The first have probably already done their best to disown the parent & are making the best of what they've been handed.

I'm also a skier, so I get your point about minority sports. I was stoked to read about Jossi Wells last week, but I really had to go searching to find follow-up info about Daron Rahlves' hip dislocation at the X-Games & whether it has put him out of Olympics contention. The great US medal hope has a major injury several weeks before the Winter Olympics & there's no mention of it - what if it had been Michael Phelps just before Beijing?

Better to have 'pushy' parents encouraging and motivating kids to exercise and learn what competition is, rather than 'pushy' kids at home demanding tv, xbox and lollies all the time.

When everyone's declared a winner - NO ONE IS A WINNER.

My wife coaches netball teams at the high school she teaches at, and I have seen plenty of over attitudinal parents on the sidelines (thankfully in the minority).

The worst was one who insisted on loudly calling every mistake and error in a totally negative way, but when confronted about it was somehow convinced that "the girls respond well to that". I didn't tell her I had overheard the team asking her daughter at quarter time if she could get her mum to shut the hell up. Convinced of her righteousness, she then had a go at the coach (my wife), since the team "won their grade with a different coach last year, but haven't won a game this season, what are you doing wrong?", oblivious to the fact that they were playing in a higher grade this season. The stupidity would have been laughable if it wasn't so frustrating.

but why no idea of where the kids place!! ridiculous

samm #6 10:59am

I remember parents like that from my footballing days. I admit as a player though I was no angel, probably because I'm a pretty competitive person.

As for my future kids, I'd love for them to do well but I can only ask of them to do the best they can. That's all my parents ever asked of me whenever I had a crack at something.

To observe parents doing their best pitbull-on-crack impressions, I recommend refereeing high school netball. Might be the same with all sports, but I'm never doing it again. Being heckled is never fun, but it is especially demoralising when you are giving up your Saturday because of some misplaced sentimental urge to give back to the community, enabling the heckler's precious daughter to actually play in the first place.

When I was at high school I would have been completely mortified if my Mum had yelled at the ref on my behalf - even if there had been a questionable call. These days, apparently it is ok to follow the ref up and down the sideline of your kid's game screaming things which prove that you don't know any of the rules.

The bottom line of this is that kids do better (and this extends to competition) where there is enjoyment and encoragement. By all means hold winners up as people to respect, and, for a small proportion of the population to aspire to, but if we focus our sporting and business worlds only on the winners then we lose massive gains that can be made to our economy and society in general.

Now that sounds waaay too PC for my liking, but it is supported by some hard science (e.g. University of Pennsylvanyia's Strengths Finder programme). Kids are largely self-centred, and only a small proportion of kids actually get a motivation to improve performance by focussing on the goal of winning.

The Strengths Finder work carried out an interesting experiment. They got two evenly-matched groups of kids to do an activity, then they took the two groups away. The first group was coached to reduce or eliminate the things they did wrong. The second group focussed on building on the things they did right.

When the activity was tried again, the group with the positive focus beat the group trying to improve on areas of poor performance. They beat them by a significant margin.

This isn't to say that one should not focus on weakenesses. The thesis is to wring as much as you can out of the things you like doing, and doing well, and then if you are keen to progress further, then look at the less palatable things.