The Benefits of Sports for Adolescent Development

Abstract

How sports benefit the development through adolescence Introduction Sports are significant activities that humans need to engage in throughout their lives. While defining sports, it is imperative to view it as any physical activity that a person engages in for pleasure or exercise. To this effect, sports help keep humans fit and physically strong throughout their lives, thus essential in each developmental stage of life. Engaging in sports improves humans’ personality and keeps all body organs alert, which proves essential for any developing teenager. Some people are very poor academically, but their personality remains defined by their sports engagement. For instance, through sports, a teenager's character may become built through developments in critical and analytical thinking, goal setting and risk-taking, shaping the future of such an adolescent powerfully. The need to analyze how sports benefit the development through adolescence is essential in understanding the impacts of sports on human development. Adolescence is a tricky developmental stage; thus, it is essential to engage its members in sports as it positively improves their health, emotional balance, strength, and skills, leading to a long healthy life. Adolescence is a crucial and sensitive transition stage as it defines psychological and physical developments from puberty to adulthood. It is a very gradual process that takes quite a significant amount of time to shape the child into adulthood. Thus, it requires great patience and proper monitoring to help the child transition accordingly. The adolescence process occurs between the ages of 10 to 19 years, implying that most adolescents are students either in primary or secondary schools, thus the need for proper guidance from teachers, parents, and society throughout this developmental phase. Adolescence exposes many children to peer pressures attributed to innate changes that they experience, like feeling mature, uncontrollable and independent during this period. Through the proper guidance, adolescents can become exposed to sport to limit their chances of engaging in destructive activities to search for happiness or kill their free time. Engaging in sport proves essential during this period as it enhances the acquisition of knowledge and skills that help shape the incoming adult. According to Razak, Abd Jabar and Wahid (2012), involvement in sports plays a significant role in enhancing humans' physical fitness and mental health, most especially in adolescents. According to these authors, parents must engage in sports with their children to show them the value of sports in shaping one's character and enhancing body fitness. Sporting activities prove essential as they prevent adolescents from engaging in harmful activities during their leisure time. As argued earlier, most people feel the need to engage in activities that define happiness and satisfaction for them during adolescence. For this reason, if the teachers or parents do not expose such characters to positive activities like sports during this period, these characters source alternative activities that best suit their leisure time. Just as sport helps shape the adolescent's personality, so will other negative activities fostered by peer pressure like partying, drug abuse, and delinquency shape their character. Adolescents' minds become conditioned to exposures, which shape their routine behavior. In case such an adolescent becomes conditioned to sports. The mind captures excellent knowledge and skills on the exposed activity, enhancing the urge for engagement and participation in such sports anytime the adolescent gets a chance. Through such engagements, the student's physical fitness remains defined with relief after sporting enhances mental health significantly. Such an adolescent performs in sports and all other areas of life, with academics proving the most positively impacted. Wretman (2017) argue that an increase in youth physical activities in the school environment is an identified priority as it enhances positive child development. Schools must create extra time for students' physical exercises to ensure that these adolescents remain occupied by sports throughout their adolescence, as it positively affects their overall academic performance. As Wretman (2017) puts it, regular participation in sports and physical exercises among adolescents "students" positively triggers attentiveness levels in the classroom. During adolescence, satisfaction and relief prove essential as they define the character's self-esteem greatly. After engaging in sports, most of the students feel happy, relaxed and fully composed, having identified their strengths in their sports of choice. Teaching such a student implies that the adolescent feels ready and composed and not disturbed by any negative forces, making such a character experience high levels of attentiveness, which increases the ability to concentrate. Concentration helps the student absorb what the teacher teaches, recall content and perform exceedingly academically in the long run. In short, engaging in sports helps the adolescent mind relax, mature and develop skills that become applicable in their daily lives. Sports also play a significant role in shaping an adolescent's self-esteem, which is the key to feeling accepted, valued and accepting life in return. In "The relationship between sports participation and self-esteem during early adolescence" article by Anne Bowker, it is clear that sports participation plays a significant role in shaping adolescents' personalities. According to this author, the adolescence period exposes the child to struggles with the cognitive, physical and social changes throughout the entire transition period (Bowker, 2006). The changes may be stressful and uncomfortable, leading to a decline in feelings of self-worth. When adolescents lose self-worth, they start losing the meaning of life and experience a decline in general satisfaction with the physical self, proving a severe threat to such a character's physical self-esteem. During adolescence, some people experience shocking changes like the breaking of voice, breast growth, and hair generation in private areas and pimples on the face, which affect physical normalcy within the victim. Such changes may make the victim assume that their physical appearances/attractiveness has become tampered with, adversely affecting their self-esteem. Remaining idle exposes such adolescents to painful thoughts about their new being, adversely affecting their self-esteem, making it challenging for many to cope with the process and thus engage in harmful activities. Engaging in sports-related activities during this period proves the most viable option as it limits the chances of self-esteem decline. The adolescent engaging in sports increases the feeling of well-being attributed to increased physical competence, which enhances satisfaction with physical appearance. (Bowker, 2006). Adding the same, Collins et al. (2018) confirms that involvement in sports helps children develop respect for their body and other people’s body. According to these authors, engaging in sports proves essential, especially during adolescence, as it...