Peer-reviewed article
Parental achievement orientations and parent-perceived child Well-being in competitive youth swimming: A qualitative study with parent in Türkiye
Naci Kalkan, Aylin Zekioğlu, Bahtiyar Ulaş Urhan, Furkan Korkut, Seda Nur UYSAL et al. ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This study explores how parents of young competitive swimmers in Turkey understand success, failure, and family sacrifice in relation to their children's well-being. Through interviews with 12 parents, the researchers found that parents create family environments around training that involve significant sacrifices and generate feelings of obligation in their children. The study identifies patterns in how parents from different socioeconomic backgrounds assign meaning to sport and reorganize daily family life around competitive activities.
Key points
- Parents attach different meanings to sport depending on their socioeconomic background
- Parents describe their investment in their children's swimming as creating a sense of indebtedness or obligation in the children
- Parental roles differentiate after competitive failure, suggesting different responses by mothers and fathers
- Family life is substantially reorganized around training, with unequal distribution of visible and invisible labor
- Only one parent per family participated, so findings reflect parental perceptions rather than observed family processes or child outcomes
Limitations
The study captures only one parent's perspective per family and does not include interviews with children or direct measurement of child well-being or outcomes, so it reflects parental narratives and interpretations rather than observed family dynamics or measured impacts on children. The authors acknowledge these findings are analytically constructed propositions to guide future research rather than definitive conclusions about children's experiences.
Abstract
Parents shape the daily relational environment in which their children participate in competitive sport, and this environment is understood as a family-level resource that can both protect and threaten children’s psychological well-being. Yet how this environment is built during everyday life remains poorly documented at the process level. We examined how parents of young athletes competing in national swimming competitions described sacrifice, success, failure, and the organization of family life, and what these accounts might tell us about the athletes’ motivational worlds. In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 parents (7 fathers, 5 mothers), and the data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis informed by McClelland’s achievement motivation framework and self-determination theory. Four interrelated themes were constructed from the parents’ narratives: the meanings that parents from different socioeconomic backgrounds attach to sport; a sacrifice–obligation dynamic in which parents described their investment as generating a felt sense of indebtedness in their children; the differentiation of parental roles after competitive failure; and a markedly unequal distribution of visible and invisible family labor, made explicit through parents’ descriptions of how daily life was reorganized around training. Because only one parent from each family took part and no children were interviewed or assessed, the narratives reflect parents’ perceptions rather than observed family processes or measured child outcomes. The motivational interpretations offered here are therefore best understood as analytically constructed propositions, not findings about children. In this sense, the study identifies narrative and relational processes at the family level as possible targets for family-centered support and protection work with young athletes, and points to what a multi-informant design should test in future research.