Parent education in the youth sports area is lacking within the current research (Dorsch et al., 2019). It would be important for future research to focus on understanding a variety of stakeholders within youth sports in order to develop a research-based parent education training to keep sports at the heart of the child and not in the hands of the adult driving the participation and desire (Dorsch et al., 2019).
There is significant research in the sports arena, the positive and negative impacts, and many other specific sport-based activities. However, there is limited understanding on what influences parent involvement and what can be done to show the areas of success. Sports for a young athlete is not a one man show and should be looked at as a system. It is important to further research in how the sports community can teach and educate parents to best support their child athlete. As such, it is recommended that future surveys and research serve to identify the effective ways in which a parent can best support their child to better the family relationship, keep the child active in sports, and increase mental health well-being of their child. The end goal of this project will create a systematic parent education training and on-going parent development that can be adopted by sports organizations across the United States.
It is recommended that further research and development be provided to determine best ways to provide ongoing education through the competitive sports area to parents for support to a child/athlete. There is a lack of research in the reasons why parents do what they do, and they are using their own experiences to drive their decisions on how they support their child. The competitive sports field does not support research-based principals and theories to positively build the relationship between parent-child. We know children rely on the support of their parent in many areas of their life, and sports is no different.