engleski

Cardiovascular and Emotional Patterns of Parents Watching Their Child Compete

Researchers often document occurrences of the cardiovascular patterns within competitive sports (e.g., Karpan, Škof, Bon, & Šibila, 2015). However, researchers rarely focus on documenting parental cardiovascular patterns at tournaments. Recently, Lochbaum, Prosoli, and Barić (2017) recorded the cardiovascular patterns as well as prospective and retrospective thoughts of two parents watching their son compete in a highly valued competition. The researchers concluded that more in-depth knowledge of emotions would improve future research efforts to assist parents’ abilities to manage themselves. Hence, our purpose was to document parent cardiovascular and emotional responses to watching their child compete while also paying attention to their thoughts before and after the competition. Parents wore a device, made by Firstbeat Technologies, which continuously monitored their heart rate from Wednesday evening to Monday evening. The competition was on Saturday, and it was the taekwondo Croatian National Championships for cadets. Parents also completed two open-ended questions, one before the tournament (Please give a short description of your expectations regarding today's competition.) and one after (Please describe your day, give us some thoughts about today's competition, and describe how you felt during today's competition.). They completed the ESP- 40 questionnaire (Emotion State Profile ; Hanin, 2010) 11 times during this period, including before and after each fight. Their child had two fights: she won the first one and lost the second one. The results show that, before the contest, the dad expected that his daughter would fight as best she could while giving her best effort. The mother hoped that her daughter would pass the first fight. Parents had a similar pattern of cardiovascular responses to watching their daughter compete but differed in intensity. Competition reflections indicate that mother expressed sadness while father reported feeling nervous and uncertain about the outcome of each fight. Emotional profiles of the mother and father demonstrated patterns hinging on the fight outcomes as opposed to the overall experience. Although our research only included one set of parents, which represent the main limitation of this study, it suggests that parents may require some coping strategies in and around the competitive sports environment.

parents, sport, combat sport, young athletes

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