Goals for self: A phenomenological study of parents in youth sport

Youth sport has become an important part of American culture with as many as 30 million children and youth playing a sport or sports each year. The question of how and why children are introduced to sport and how they are sustained and supported within the family structure as it relates to a sport career has been presented as a vital area of interest. Little attention has been given to what the motivation and reward for parental support are, as self-identified by parents. The purpose of this study was to provide an in-depth description of what parents with children who are alpine skiers viewed as their motives and rewards for initiating and continued support of the sport career of their children.;A purposeful sample of 12 families with children and youth currently engaged in one of the three stages of sport theorized by Cote was recruited from four ski clubs in the Western United States. Semistructured, topical interviews, based on a guiding set of initial questions, were conducted. The emerged essence of the phenomenon was interpreted as the parents honoring their own personal values by living those values and sharing them with their children with a goal of having the children adopt those goals in order to develop prosocial moral character. Three overarching categories, including (a) Defining the Family, (b) Values and Life Lessons, and (c) Personal Affirmations, were derived from 15 higher order and 66 lower and midranged themes synthesized from 939 instances of 292 meaning units during inductive content analysis.;Interpretations of the results extend the research in family sport experience by supporting the prosocial potential impact of sports on the lived experience of athletic, complex families. Parents held beliefs that alpine ski sport was a highly desirable and prized family activity that was foundational to defining the family and structuring its athletic components. Further, sport was viewed as instrumental in the acquisition of the values and development of moral character traits desired for their children. Successful transition of the stages resulted in feelings of validation for the choices and skills of parenting.