Parents: Playing Sports Raises Your Kid’s GPA
All you parents out there, we need to keep our kids in sport!
It is widely and commonly cited that youth dropout rates in sports are staggering. Discouraged children are simply quitting sports before the age of 13. This is the cold hard truth. A fact, as it once was.
So what if I was to tell you parents, or soon to be parents, that keeping your children in sport will also raise their academic performance!
In recent blogs I have reiterated the fact that sport has many social, psychological, emotional and physical values. Now, the focus of this blog is to enlighten your knowledge on the correlations between sport involvement and the positive effect towards academic achievement. Yes it’s true; if you stay in sports you will also get better grades. Just what every parent wants to hear.
A few years back, a California research study used sports in their school curriculum in an effort to improve academic achievement. Overall, the study revealed strong numerical evidence that sports participation in school does in fact show promising results for improving students’ academics i.e. grades.
This is just one study from a barrage on the subject. Doing a simple google search on this topic will bare hundreds of scholarly articles. Studies continue to support the idea that sports and physical activity has positive effects in relation to academic achievement. Research at the University of Miami School of Medicine, found that, “students with a high level of exercise had better relationships with their parents, were less depressed, spent more time involved in sports, used drugs less frequently, and had higher grade point averages than did students with a low level of exercise.”
Another report suggests that even an extra hour of involvement in physical activity may have gains in GPA and that taking time away from physical activity and adding it to academic subject learning does not help the GPA.
Parents we need to keep our children in sports, if not for all the other benefits, at least so they get better grades. Okay that was slightly brash, but you get my point here.
So how can we keep our children in sport? Play Better achieves this by breaking down the scoreboard. This win-at-all-cost mentality in youth sport sets children up for failure. In the long run, the pressure to win will simply deter most children from continuing. I know many parents think their kid will be the next Garth Bale, but the reality is only a handful of children will be selected to the next level. And even less to the next.
One of the Play Better programs main goals is to keep children in sport. With Play Better, players receive charitable rewards for achieving technical development milestones. The long-term impact is better players who understand positive impact beyond the scoreboard: citizenship, community investment, and personal growth.
Furthermore, I have cited examples from the academia which even aver to the notion that keeping kids in sport will raise their academic goals and grades. I think this is a extremely important and powerful idea that continues to validate what we aim to achieve with Play Better.
So where do we go from here?
I say you join the teams that have already signed up and start Playing Better today.
