Jul 23, 2011 07:11 GMT  ·  By

Investigators at the Queen’s University, in Canada, determined in a new study that playing team sports helps children hone their social and personal skills in an enjoyable, yet challenging, environment.

Generally, the atmosphere that develops within a sports team has a positive effect on youngsters, who learn how to involve and improve themselves in a setting that does not necessarily put them into competition with others.

These are important skills to learn for the young ones, researchers say. Cohesiveness is also a trait that kids should be exposed to as early as possible, and teams provide that in abundance. Overall, the positive effects of team sports far outweigh some of its drawbacks.

QU researcher Jean Côté, PhD, says that the correlation is especially strong for kids aged 9 to 19, who are exposed to a positive team environment. This implies all the players being equally valued on the field, as well as participating in team activities in members' spare time.

“There’s a lot more to sport than the idea of winning and losing and developing physical skills. Under the right conditions, youth sport can help children develop transferable personal and social skills – citizenship qualities that they’ll retain throughout their lives,” the scientist adds.

What teams do is allow individuals to learn and better themselves by competing against internal benchmarks. This means that youth are less encouraged to focus on comparisons with others, which may have a detrimental effect on their self-esteem and perception of worth.

Kids who play sports are also more likely to find initiative and internal sources of motivation, the researcher says. “Other research we’ve conducted suggests that kids don’t necessarily need lots of pressure early on to become elite,” Côté adds, quoted by PsychCentral.

An important factor in determining how children will react to sports includes the demands that a specific sport places on them. Highly competitive ones tend to force kids to specialize at an earlier age, whereas sports such as hockey, soccer and football do not.

“If you create a coaching environment where the kids are happy and passionate they’ll continue to be involved and develop their skills. If you burn kids out at a very early age, you might be left with a small group of technically gifted kids, but you may also waste talent in the process,” the experts say.