| How To Not Become a Crazy Golf Parent
How to reward a kid the right way to keep them obsessed with golf
You’ve heard about the kid in a candy store, but what about the junior golfer in an ice cream shop? Sweden’s Ludvig Åberg says it was enjoying the frozen delight with his dad following rounds of golf that helped spark his love for the game. Fellow countrywoman and World Golf Hall of Famer Annika Sorenstam recalls enjoying plenty of ice cream at the golf course growing up, the memory of which today still “brings a smile to my face,” she says.
Perks to incentivize a child to practice or play can create fun associations. Sport psychologists agree, however, that not all rewards are created equal, and understanding how to properly motivate a junior golfer can be the difference between burnout and lifelong enjoyment.
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Dr. Beth Brown played collegiate golf before earning her doctorate in sport psychology. She has devoted her professional career to youth development, notably at The First Tee and now as the Senior Athlete Development Specialist at the USGA. Coincidentally, when she was growing up in eastern Oklahoma, Brown’s dad owned an ice cream shop, and she recalls teams and families regularly flooding in to celebrate a win.
Brown coined this the “Dairy Queen Syndrome” because the ice cream reward was almost always contingent upon the team winning. “When those incentives are based solely on outcome, which become extrinsic motivators, they produce some short-term results in kids but do long-term damage because they lose that fun, that joy, that reason they’re playing,” Brown says.
Dr. Albert Petitpas, a former psychology professor at Springfield College and one of the nation’s leading authorities on sport-based youth development, agrees that extrinsic rewards like these are lousy motivators. “They put all the emphasis on outcomes and not the process of how you get there,” says Petitpas, who helped develop the foundation and training program of The First Tee.
Placing too much emphasis on outcome can cause juniors to tie their identity as golfers to their identity as people, says Pia Nilsson, one of Golf Digest’s Legends of Golf Instruction. “If I can’t feel good with who I am, independent of my outcomes, then it’s going to backfire,” says Nilsson, who along with Lynn Marriott founded VISION54, a popular performance school in Scottsdale.
Self-determination theory was formed in the 1980s and is a widely accepted framework for understanding human motivation. When people are self-determined, it means they are intrinsically motivated to do an activity because they are driven by enjoyment and interest. This creates long-term satisfaction. However, the theory holds that to achieve a sense of self-determination, people must feel that they are in control during the activity.
When parents offer their kids rewards for shooting a certain score, they erode this autonomy. “If rewards are used to consistently control the young person’s behavior, there’s no more self-determination,” Brown says. “There’s limited autonomy. Their behavior is being controlled by the adult.”
What’s a good way to help a child find joy in golf without constantly dangling rewards over them? Petitpas says one answer is intermittent reinforcement, which is giving a reward at irregular intervals. At The First Tee, Petitpas encouraged creative games that would get juniors less focused on outcomes and more on the process. If Petitpas noticed a junior was swinging out of balance, for example, he would tell the child to hold the finish so that he could take a picture of the sole of the child’s shoe. When Petitpas showed the junior the photograph, this served as the external reward. “If they can get some success experiences, that develops their belief that ‘Maybe I can do this,” Petitpas says. “Then comes the self-efficacy and then comes the addiction to golf.”
Instead of rewarding juniors only when they succeed, Brown says to also reward them for accomplishing process-based goals, like trying their best, keeping a positive attitude or being a good teammate. Equally important is to not offer these rewards every time to tap into the power of intermittent reinforcement.
When utilized properly, rewards can be a powerful tool for creating a fun and communal atmosphere that will help juniors fall in love with the game. “Joy could come from having fun training sessions and then eating ice cream or a cinnamon roll together,” Nilsson says. “That could be part of making it fun, along with being with friends and being social and not always being compared because of your outcome and rankings.”
Fun: A simple goal espoused by Sorenstam, Nilsson, Petitpas, Brown and parents all over. But how do you know you’ve done it right?
“When you take the kids home, you want them to say, ‘When can we go back, Mommy?’ That’s the biggest success,” Sorenstam says.
