Abstract
Sport is an important developmental context for children, and experiences involving parents, coaches, and peers affect a variety of important psychosocial outcomes, including motivational processes. Linking concepts from achievement goal theory with motivational constructs in self-determination theory, this study examined relations between the motivational climate created by parents and both the nature and changes in sport-related motivation in young athletes, using Grolnick and Ryan’s autonomous regulation index, which summarizes the relative strength of intrinsic and extrinsic forms of motivation. We followed a sample (N=308) of 9-14 year old swim club athletes during a 32-week season, measuring their reports of the parent-initiated motivational climate as well as autonomous regulation at the beginning of the season, at midseason, and at the end of the season. Cross sectional analyses at each point revealed that children whose parents created a mastery climate, which defines success in terms of enjoyment of the activity, self-improvement, and effort, reported higher levels of autonomous regulation (intrinsic motivation) than did those whose parent created an ego climate that emphasized winning, avoidance of mistakes, and ability comparison with others. In contrast, ego climate scores were positively related to extrinsic motivation scores. Girls exhibited higher autonomous regulation than did boys. An extreme-group longitudinal analysis showed that children exposed to a strong mastery environment exhibited higher autonomous regulation and increased in autonomous regulation from mid-season to late-season, whereas an ego-climate group decreased in internal regulation during this interval.
Highlights
Parent-child relationships are fundamental to a child’s development and overall well-being [1,2]
Linking concepts from achievement goal theory with motivational constructs in self-determination theory, this study examined relations between the motivational climate created by parents and both the nature and changes in sport-related motivation in young athletes, using Grolnick and Ryan’s autonomous regulation index, which summarizes the relative strength of intrinsic and extrinsic forms of motivation
Results of this study indicate that young athletes’ intrinsicextrinsic motivation was significantly related to their perceptions of the motivational climate created by their parents
Summary
Parent-child relationships are fundamental to a child’s development and overall well-being [1,2]. A mastery climate is autonomy-supportive because there is a focus on enjoyment, effort, self-referenced learning and a relative absence of normative comparison Under such conditions, evaluative concerns should be lowered while intrinsically motivated values are enhanced [19,21,22]. An ego climate is theoretically not autonomy-supportive because its focus on normative and social comparison, punishment of mistakes, and general evaluation, results in outcome-dependent goals that are externally oriented and less under personal control [13] To this point, research relating motivational climate to autonomous regulation has focused almost exclusively on the motivational climate promoted by the coach climate. We predicted that a high parental mastery climate would be related to positive changes in autonomous regulation over the course of the sport season, while a high ego climate will demonstrate either no relation or a decline in autonomous regulation
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