Journal of Child and Adolescent Behavior
Open Access

Research Article

Parent-initiated Motivational Climate and Young Athletes Intrinsic-Extrinsic Motivation: Cross-sectional and Longitudinal Relations

¹Department of Psychology, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195-1525, USA

²School of Health, University of Bath, Bath, UK

*Corresponding Author:

Ronald E Smith
Department of Psychology, Box 351525
University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195-1525, USA
Tel: (206) 543-8817; 543-6511
Fax: (206) 616-8367
E-mail: resmith@uw.edu

Received Date: March 18, 2013; Accepted Date: August 16, 2013; Published Date: August 20, 2013

Citation: O’Rourke DJ, Smith RE, Smoll FL, Cumming SP (2013) Parent-initiated Motivational Climate and Young Athletes’ Intrinsic-Extrinsic Motivation: Crosssectional and Longitudinal Relations. J Child Adolesc Behav 1:109. doi: 10.4172/2375-4494.1000109

Copyright: © 2013 O’Rourke DJ, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

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.

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