Le rôle des parents dans le développement des jeunes joueurs de football et de tennis brésiliens

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to compare the parental involvement of 22 developing, elite Brazilian football and tennis players from clubs in Belo Horizonte over various stages of their careers. The parents were required to respond to a questionnaire originally designed by Davidson, Howe, Moore and Sloboda (1996) for developing musicians with additional sport specific scales. The demographic data on the socio-economic status of the two groups was considerably different, with the tennis players originating from middle and upper middle class backgrounds living in an urban setting, while the football players were from rural settings and came from lower economic backgrounds. While many of the items did not differentiate between the two groups, there were significant overall differences found. In that the football players were required to move away from their family environment when selected as future professional players, the tennis players remained at home and received more parental attention as they grew older. Current models of parental involvement developed in North America (Côté, 1999), appear to be applicable more to middle class sports in Brazil than to those practiced by athletes in less fortunate financial conditions.