Kids are a product of their environment and we've all grown up as products of our environment. I used to wonder as a player why I was so negative. I was a very negative player. I'd get upset on the tennis court and everyone used to tell me I was negative. I couldn't understand why. I tried to change it, my coach tried to change it, everyone told me about it. I was aware of it, but it wasn't changing until I realized that the environment that I was in as a child was a lot of the time negative.
Now if you listen to the people around you and you listen to how they speak and you listen to what they do and how they act and how they respond, that's generally how you become. So if you're seeing your child practicing on the court (whether you're a coach or a parent) and you see this happen, a lot of this stems from our upbringing and what happens at home.
As a coach I only see my players 1, 2, 3 hours a week. Some a bit more, some a bit less. So in that time we can't make these huge changes to the way that their behaviors are as coaches. That work needs to be done by the families and by the parents.
"Your family values come out in your kids when they're playing."
So one of the things you need to reflect on as parents (we all need to reflect on) is what do we value? What do we think are the most important things that we want our children to become? Whatever we want them to become, we need to replicate that environment and those behaviors at home, in our language, in our actions, in the way we interact with them. Because they are gonna be a clone of you as a parent. So that's one of the critical components about development as a tennis player, is that most of the development actually comes early on in the early years from their home.
So let's think about how we act and react to what our kids are doing, because they are just a direct reflection of how we're parenting.