Tohoku J. Exp. Med., 2021 March, 253(3)

Characteristics of Parents Who Feel a Lack of Communication with Coaches of Youth Sports

Yutaka Yabe,¹ Yoshihiro Hagiwara,^1,2 Takuya Sekiguchi,¹ Haruki Momma,³ Masahiro Tsuchiya,⁴ Kenji Kanazawa,¹ Shinichirou Yoshida,¹ Eiji Itoi¹ and Ryoichi Nagatomi^2,3

¹Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, Tohoku University School of Medicine, Sendai, Miyagi, Japan
²Department of Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, Tohoku University School of Medicine, Sendai, Miyagi, Japan
³Division of Biomedical Engineering for Health and Welfare, Tohoku University Graduate School of Biomedical Engineering, Sendai, Miyagi, Japan
⁴Department of Nursing, Faculty of Health Science, Tohoku Fukushi University, Sendai, Miyagi, Japan

Communication between parents and their children�fs coaches is important for children�fs sports activities, but the relationship between parents and coaches is not well understood. It is possible that parents feel a lack of communication with coaches, which could be due to parents�f experience with sports activities or the social environment of the team. This study aimed to elucidate the characteristics of parents who feel a lack of communication with their children�fs coaches of youth sports. A cross-sectional study was conducted on parents of young athletes (n = 6,641) and multivariate logistic regression analyses were performed to assess factors related to parents�f feeling of a lack of communication with their children�fs coaches. Among the respondents, 29.4% of parents felt a lack of communication with their children�fs coaches. The factors related to the parents�f feeling were a shorter duration of their children playing the present sport, an absence of experience playing the same sport as their children or playing in a team with high competition level, dissatisfaction with their children�fs attitude towards sports activities, and an awareness of verbal and/or physical abuse by the coaches and bullying by the teammates in their children�fs team. Parents�f previous sports experience and awareness of interpersonal violence in their children�fs team were associated with their feeling of a lack of communication with coaches. Educating parents on the sport and their roles in youth sport is necessary to make appropriate mutual communication between parents and coaches, which could lead to better circumstances for young athletes.

Keywords —— coaches; communication; interpersonal violence; parents; youth sport

© 2021 Tohoku University Medical Press

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Tohoku J. Exp. Med 2021 253, 191-198.

Correspondence: Yoshihiro Hagiwara, Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, Tohoku University School of Medicine, 2-1 Seiryo-machi, Aoba-ku, Sendai, Miyagi 980-8574, Japan.

e-mail: hagi@med.tohoku.ac.jp