Ending Child Abuse in Youth Sports with Dr. Amy Saltzman

If your teen is involved in sports, this episode is for you. We encourage our children to get involved in sports for many reasons: have fun, meet friends, get exercise, and learn valuable skills like teamwork, perseverance, and sportsmanship. Unfortunately, there is also an epidemic of abuse as well—not just at the Olympic and college level, but in our middle and high schools too.

In this episode Dr. Amy Saltzman shares tips on how to spot and stop our own children from being abused and what we can do to create a safety net of prevention, healing, and protection to end this epidemic. 

Key Takeaways

Overt emotional abuse involves yelling and screaming and is easy to detect.

Covert emotional abuse is subtle and often extremely hard to detect. Often looks like generosity at first with love bombs (special treatment, praise, gifts, and friendship). Builds trust.

The four primary patterns that covert emotionally abusive coaches weave together to create the web of covert emotional abuse: tangling feelings of specialness and fear, controlling the environment, isolating victims, and distorting the truth. 

If child resists going to practice, get curious. 

To keep our children safe, we must not only dismantle the spider’s web (the abuser), but also create a safety net of prevention, healing, and protection. Enacting policies that protect children on a national level is crucial to ending the epidemic of abuse and beginning cycles of healing. 

If coach is abusive, report them. May also consider pulling child from team.

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• Dr. Saltzman’s article See It. Stop It. Heal It:  Ending Cycles of Abuse in Sports and Society
• Spot a Spider videos
• Dr. Cam’s Top 10 Secrets for Raising Teens: www.askdrcam.com/parentingtips

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