Hi everyone. I hope you're all doing well in these challenging times. I want to give you some thoughts around what we could do at home with our kids. Obviously there are parents out there that are likely homeschooling their children at the minute. There's a lot of kids at home bored, trying to stimulate themselves throughout the day.
I think the biggest part about being a parent or even a tennis coach is we generally punish the poor behaviour.
"We punish the mistake that children make or the outcome that they have"
Instead though, I want to float you the idea of praising and rewarding the right behaviors that we're looking for. So if you think about it, if you want to train a pet or in particular a dog and the dog is in front of you and you want it to sit, what we do is we wait for it to sit and then we give it a reward. We give it a treat so then if the dog wants to be rewarded it sits again.
I feel like it's the same in coaching. If we want to see a behavior being replicated and repeated over and over again it's important to reward or praise that behavior, not the outcome. It's not the "sit" of the dog, but it's the behavior. Even with our children, we want to reward behaviours like when they're going away and doing their work, or reading their book, or practicing their tennis. It doesn't matter about the outcome and how well they do it, but it's important to reward that behavior of doing.
Once we learn to reward the behavior, we learn to get repeatable behaviors. The more they do that the better, the more they become it. We don't have to get them to be successful straight away, but we have to reward what we want to see more often.
"If we reward what we want to see more often, we will get that outcome more often than not."
So when you're at home and pulling your hair out because your kids are running around and going crazy and getting bored, I think it's important to reward what you want to see more often. And if we can learn to do that, both as parents and tennis coaches, we're going to get the outcome that we want, which is repeatable success and the repeatable right behaviors. As opposed to always punishing the wrong, which results in the kids only know what they're doing wrong. Hopefully that can give you something to work with over this time. Good luck.