Parents That lady you hate on Twitter

[JBS]

I think part of the disconnect is that it's the owner and front office that run social media, not the coaches. I think the coaches would be more fair and more independent of "cuteness factor" when choosing posts.

Not a chance. I know tons of coaches that run social media.

 

[Dahlia]

Not a chance. I know tons of coaches that run social media.

For our gym that is not the case. The gym's social media account is updated by the owner and office staff. Coaches cannot post girls on their personal accounts.

 

[mom2newgymnast]

For our gym that is not the case. The gym's social media account is updated by the owner and office staff. Coaches cannot post girls on their personal accounts.

It's definitely run by our office staff too. Who, of course, are mostly the moms of the young, talented girls on the team.

 

[Deleted member 26368]

It happens younger than that. Most gyms only post the younger athletes at any level. Cute 7 and 8 year olds in level 4 sell better than 11 and 12 year olds in level 4. It's sad that older gymnasts often get ignored and I wish more gyms made an effort to represent their athletes fairly. Even our gym, which is fantastic for my daughter and has taken stands against coaches with questionable practices (as in they will be fired) over-represents the younger gymnasts on social media. I think part of the disconnect is that it's the owner and front office that run social media, not the coaches. I think the coaches would be more fair and more independent of "cuteness factor" when choosing posts.

Sheesh, this makes me thankful our smallish gym has a very minimal social media presence! They occasionally post clips from optionals practice (all tween/teenagers), and a picture of each team at meets. I think the owner, who's also one of the optionals coaches, decides what is posted. I can imagine the issues posed by a facility with a much larger advertising/social media presence.

 

[MuggleMom]

Our's mostly posts drills done by the head coach so its always the homeschool kids and the age varies he picks the one with the best form for that drill. They dont do much on Social Media I think they are trying to do more but its not really alot of videos of kids doing gymnastics which I am fine with.

 

[SupportingHerDreams]

One thing that bothers me in these conversations is the amount of finger pointing and blame casting. I rarely see people talk about what we can do to avoid these situations, it always seems more of time to talk about what others need to do. Personally, I have always asked my daughter if she is comfortable at different places. From a very young age I NEVER asked if she was a good girl and instead would wait till we were alone and ask her if she was comfortable. She is 7 now and we always talk about things said in classes or group settings that may have made someone else feel bad. We talk about things done and said and how they effected others. That is part of my attempt to avoid this kind of situation with my daughter. We talk about how much we love certain people but even people we love very much can make bad choices and make us uncomfortable. I am trying so hard to keep communication open in our house but I don't stop there. I watch my child around people... I watch her body language. I look for signs past what she is telling me on how others treat her. I can't say that we will never fall into something terrible like this original post but I can say that I am working damn hard to all that I can to avoid it!

 

[JBS]

For our gym that is not the case. The gym's social media account is updated by the owner and office staff. Coaches cannot post girls on their personal accounts.

That's fine... but you are assuming that it would be much better if the coaches did it. I know tons of coaches that do the social media for their gyms and it is the same as what you stated. Social media is typically done for the business of the gym... not to be fair.

 

[Sk8ermaiden]

I have talked to my kid until I'm blue in the face, AND we've voted with our feet and left two negative gymnastics environments. Her gym is fantastic and her coaches are wonderful at keeping in mind that the gymnasts are children and individuals. But given what we've seen, I have opinions on how things could be better. *shrug* A lot of people are doing a lot of things wrong, up and down the list.

 

[gymjunkie]

I think USA Gymnastics needs to do a major revamping of how to develop good coaches, coaching technique, and teaching coaches how to be more of a mentor than a drill Sargent, but also teaching the necessary skills.

Make no mistake, USAG created the current coaching "techniques" and has put those coaches out there as mentors to aspiring coaches.

 

[gymjunkie]

One thing that bothers me in these conversations is the amount of finger pointing and blame casting. I rarely see people talk about what we can do to avoid these situations, it always seems more of time to talk about what others need to do. Personally, I have always asked my daughter if she is comfortable at different places. From a very young age I NEVER asked if she was a good girl and instead would wait till we were alone and ask her if she was comfortable. She is 7 now and we always talk about things said in classes or group settings that may have made someone else feel bad. We talk about things done and said and how they effected others. That is part of my attempt to avoid this kind of situation with my daughter. We talk about how much we love certain people but even people we love very much can make bad choices and make us uncomfortable. I am trying so hard to keep communication open in our house but I don't stop there. I watch my child around people... I watch her body language. I look for signs past what she is telling me on how others treat her. I can't say that we will never fall into something terrible like this original post but I can say that I am working damn hard to all that I can to avoid it!

I am glad that you are working hard to avoid it, but your naivete about how simple it is to do so is what may actually make her vulnerable. That being said, I would not expect a parent of a 7 YO to be anything but naïve about this sport unless you were a gymnast yourself.

When your daughter is pre-teen or a teenager, she will likely become bonded with her teammates. Her teammates will "get" the struggles of the gym (normal healthy ones as well as abusive ones if they exist). She will no longer share with you what she shares now, because you "don't get it" and "can't get it." This is one of the biggest problems about schools, intense sports and cults for that matter. They create a scenario where children spend more time around people other than their parents and family. That being the case, they start to turn to those in their non-family social group and not their family.

Having once been a pre-teen and teen gymnast in a gym with an emotionally/physically abusive coach/owner (who was also sexually inappropriate), I will tell you that I never once went to my wonderful parents for help for the following reasons:

• For many years I loved gymnastics so much that I was willing to be treated poorly as long as I was allowed to continue to do gymnastics.
• I did not realize I was being abused because I was treated the same as my teammates (sometimes better).
• Abusive coaches were glorified in the media as if they were heroes. While I was a young optional gymnast, I remember watching a TV program with my parents about a famous coach and his national team member gymnast. The gymnast missed a release skill and somehow ended up bleeding from the mouth. The famous coach rushed her back to the bar to do the skill again and again while blood dripped from her face. The reported narrated the scene by commenting how Mr. famous coach got such great results because he knew "how to push the gymnasts when they needed it" and how this future olympic gymnast had "learned such discipline from her coach" that she was able to repeat skills over and over until they were perfect. None of us reacted in horror, we just took the reporter's word for it that this was about good coaching and discipline. The bloody scene immediately segued into a scene where the two of them were smiling from ear to ear hugging over her catching that same release in a near perfect bar routine at an important competition. The take home messages from that type of reporting were... you should trust that you're fine when you're bleeding even though your famous coach didn't stop to check the injury... don't bother even checking your own injury, just trust that you are fine because your coach seems to think you are... and even if it seems a little harsh, this is how gold medals are earned.
• I often saw an abusive style of coaching at training clinics and competitions, so I had no reason to believe my coach was that different from other coaches. For instance, he would always find another gym owner willing to bet a case of beer that we could beat their team at a competition. As if we weren't stressed out enough about the competition itself, right before we started, he would inform us who were were competing against (for his case of beer) and remind us that we knew how grumpy he got when he lost a case of beer over us screwing up/losing. Yup, anytime he lost a bet, we paid the price the next week at practice and were frequently reminded of the loss the next time we went up against that gymnast or team even if it was a year or two later. The fact that he always found a coach to engage in betting no matter what state we were competing in suggested to me as a child that this was not abuse, it was normal. It never occurred to me to tell my parents that my coach bet cases of beer over us at competition. They would've been horrified, BTW.
• Lots of the parents were good buddies with the abusive coach, which reinforced my trust (and my parents' trust) in how he treated us.
• At that same gym, I had the one abusive coach and 3 coaches I adored. In part, I put up with the bad one and hid concerning things from my parents so that I could be coached by the good ones.
• I loved my teammates and would never have wanted to leave them. Often teammates form an even stronger bond when their coach is abusive. We were all so good to each other & literally had no in-fighting ever. Since I was often treated better than my teammates who had significant fears, I would have felt very badly about leaving them to go to another gym. I knew that when I did exactly what my coach demanded when they were unable to because of fears, I was the distraction that temporarily took the heat off of them. I would have felt a tremendous amount of guilt leaving. In my teenage mind, leaving them was being selfish.

So for those reasons, I was highly successful in keeping the abuse from my parents for the longest time. I maintained excellent grades and wore a smile on my face in their presence (which was not hard to do because I hardly saw them between school, gym and homework). What I could not indefinitely conceal was the eating disorder I eventually developed as a direct result of continually being told by him that I had better not get fat. My disappearing body was the first sign my parents had that there was something wrong. This led to the one and only parent conference they ever called. His reaction to the suggestion that he was somehow responsible was to kick me off the team. My parents then took me to a very supportive healthy environment, where I discovered I had no idea how to be coached in a positive way. I would love to say that eventually everything got better for me at the new gym, but that was not the case. Because I didn't know how to do high level gymnastics unless there was someone there to insult me and scream at me (and sometimes physically harm me), I retired at 15. It may shock people, but I would not have retired if I had been permitted to stay with the abusive coach. I knew how to do that. I had learned how to do that for years. I did not know how to be coached in a non-abusive way.

Seeing the two different styles of running a gym and also seeing that the positively run gym had highly successful, happy gymnasts is what later led to me becoming a coach myself. In a way I did finally overcome the abuse and make peace with the good that can exist with this sport. Did that experience keep my own daughter from experiencing abuse in gymnastics -- not completely, and believe me I did everything a parent could do to prevent it. I am 100% an OVERprotective parent, was one of her coaches at the gym where it happened, intervened often on her behalf and did quit my job/pull her out of the gym as a result. And yet... it still happened. I will keep her personal story out of this post, because she is still a minor, still competing and her complaint is under investigation.

 

[Sk8ermaiden]

I also think there is some naiveté at play, but I know that at the first gym we were at, with very little girls, we could see or would later hear things that went on that were borderline emotionally abusive, and absolutely grooming our kids to accept abusive coaching in the future, and even though we often discussed it among ourselves, only three parents of the 14 or so left. The rest were willing to keep their kids there because it "wasn't that bad." Really the reason was that the coach got such excellent results.

I agree that almost nothing we can do can fully protect our kids from this environment, but there are also a lot of parents out there sending their kids clear messages that their well-being is secondary to their performance, and they bear a lot of the blame for this situation - not just in gym but it all sports.

 

[gymjunkie]

I agree that almost nothing we can do can fully protect our kids from this environment, but there are also a lot of parents out there sending their kids clear messages that their well-being is secondary to their performance, and they bear a lot of the blame for this situation - not just in gym but it all sports.

Like the time when I asked a parent what she would like me to do to get her daughter past her fears of a particular skill that I wasn't already doing and she said to me, "I want you to scream at her until she does it." I told her that there was a gym down the street who would happily to that, but I would not. I then reaffirmed how we were getting her past her fears with ways that would work long term whereas screaming would mostly have a short-term affect in gymnastics and a long-term negative effect in life. She immediately withdrew her daughter and started at the screaming gym the next week!

So yes, I know those parents are out there too & they are a huge part of the problem. In my experience as a gymnast, coach, gym mom and judge, it's the minority, but only if you look at all of the parents of all the teams in a gym. If you zero in on a highly competitive group to get into (ie: the "elite" group or even the "group of kids who get to skip L5"), there is often a larger percentage of parents willing to sacrifice their kid's well-being over their success. IME, no matter what group they originally came from, by the time their kids are in L8 and up, parents chill out and just hope their kid goes a year without an injury, and a scholarship would be nice too. Also sometimes the winning-over-well-being parents aren't there in L 9/10 simply because their kid was burned out by L8 and quit.

 

[Sk8ermaiden]

Also sometimes the winning-over-well-being parents aren't there in L 9/10 simply because their kid was burned out by L8 and quit.

DD's coach says this frequently. Very few crazy gym moms by mid-upper optionals because they've all driven their children out of the sport.

 

[SupportingHerDreams]

I am glad that you are working hard to avoid it, but your naivete about how simple it is to do so is what may actually make her vulnerable. That being said, I would not expect a parent of a 7 YO to be anything but naïve about this sport unless you were a gymnast yourself.

When your daughter is pre-teen or a teenager, she will likely become bonded with her teammates. Her teammates will "get" the struggles of the gym (normal healthy ones as well as abusive ones if they exist). She will no longer share with you what she shares now, because you "don't get it" and "can't get it." This is one of the biggest problems about schools, intense sports and cults for that matter. They create a scenario where children spend more time around people other than their parents and family. That being the case, they start to turn to those in their non-family social group and not their family.

Having once been a pre-teen and teen gymnast in a gym with an emotionally/physically abusive coach/owner (who was also sexually inappropriate), I will tell you that I never once went to my wonderful parents for help for the following reasons:

• For many years I loved gymnastics so much that I was willing to be treated poorly as long as I was allowed to continue to do gymnastics.
• I did not realize I was being abused because I was treated the same as my teammates (sometimes better).
• Abusive coaches were glorified in the media as if they were heroes. While I was a young optional gymnast, I remember watching a TV program with my parents about a famous coach and his national team member gymnast. The gymnast missed a release skill and somehow ended up bleeding from the mouth. The famous coach rushed her back to the bar to do the skill again and again while blood dripped from her face. The reported narrated the scene by commenting how Mr. famous coach got such great results because he knew "how to push the gymnasts when they needed it" and how this future olympic gymnast had "learned such discipline from her coach" that she was able to repeat skills over and over until they were perfect. None of us reacted in horror, we just took the reporter's word for it that this was about good coaching and discipline. The bloody scene immediately segued into a scene where the two of them were smiling from ear to ear hugging over her catching that same release in a near perfect bar routine at an important competition. The take home messages from that type of reporting were... you should trust that you're fine when you're bleeding even though your famous coach didn't stop to check the injury... don't bother even checking your own injury, just trust that you are fine because your coach seems to think you are... and even if it seems a little harsh, this is how gold medals are earned.
• I often saw an abusive style of coaching at training clinics and competitions, so I had no reason to believe my coach was that different from other coaches. For instance, he would always find another gym owner willing to bet a case of beer that we could beat their team at a competition. As if we weren't stressed out enough about the competition itself, right before we started, he would inform us who were were competing against (for his case of beer) and remind us that we knew how grumpy he got when he lost a case of beer over us screwing up/losing. Yup, anytime he lost a bet, we paid the price the next week at practice and were frequently reminded of the loss the next time we went up against that gymnast or team even if it was a year or two later. The fact that he always found a coach to engage in betting no matter what state we were competing in suggested to me as a child that this was not abuse, it was normal. It never occurred to me to tell my parents that my coach bet cases of beer over us at competition. They would've been horrified, BTW.
• Lots of the parents were good buddies with the abusive coach, which reinforced my trust (and my parents' trust) in how he treated us.
• At that same gym, I had the one abusive coach and 3 coaches I adored. In part, I put up with the bad one and hid concerning things from my parents so that I could be coached by the good ones.
• I loved my teammates and would never have wanted to leave them. Often teammates form an even stronger bond when their coach is abusive. We were all so good to each other & literally had no in-fighting ever. Since I was often treated better than my teammates who had significant fears, I would have felt very badly about leaving them to go to another gym. I knew that when I did exactly what my coach demanded when they were unable to because of fears, I was the distraction that temporarily took the heat off of them. I would have felt a tremendous amount of guilt leaving. In my teenage mind, leaving them was being selfish.

So for those reasons, I was highly successful in keeping the abuse from my parents for the longest time. I maintained excellent grades and wore a smile on my face in their presence (which was not hard to do because I hardly saw them between school, gym and homework). What I could not indefinitely conceal was the eating disorder I eventually developed as a direct result of continually being told by him that I had better not get fat. My disappearing body was the first sign my parents had that there was something wrong. This led to the one and only parent conference they ever called. His reaction to the suggestion that he was somehow responsible was to kick me off the team. My parents then took me to a very supportive healthy environment, where I discovered I had no idea how to be coached in a positive way. I would love to say that eventually everything got better for me at the new gym, but that was not the case. Because I didn't know how to do high level gymnastics unless there was someone there to insult me and scream at me (and sometimes physically harm me), I retired at 15. It may shock people, but I would not have retired if I had been permitted to stay with the abusive coach. I knew how to do that. I had learned how to do that for years. I did not know how to be coached in a non-abusive way.

Seeing the two different styles of running a gym and also seeing that the positively run gym had highly successful, happy gymnasts is what later led to me becoming a coach myself. In a way I did finally overcome the abuse and make peace with the good that can exist with this sport. Did that experience keep my own daughter from experiencing abuse in gymnastics -- not completely, and believe me I did everything a parent could do to prevent it. I am 100% an OVERprotective parent, was one of her coaches at the gym where it happened, intervened often on her behalf and did quit my job/pull her out of the gym as a result. And yet... it still happened. I will keep her personal story out of this post, because she is still a minor, still competing and her complaint is under investigation.

I am so sorry that you went through all of that. You can call me naivete if you want to, I don't mind. I am not blaming only your parents for what happened to you. I just think that parents are too quick to point fingers in these situations. I think the well being of my child is first and foremost my responsibility. A responsibility that I take very seriously and refuse to make excuses on. I think if more parents were hyper alert and refused to participate in an abusive enviroment then it would not be as common. I'm not saying it will never happen to us... that would be naive. I am only saying that I am going to do anything and everything to avoid it and I also think parents should old some of the responsibility for the abusive cuture in gymnastics.

 

[Flopsygymnast]

I agree 10 yr olds training at 34 hours a week is unsustainable. However I think this sport has to differentiate between the naturally talented and those who arent and overtrain. Gyms should not be showcasing 10 yr old level 9s who train 34hrs a week. I have a 10yr old sister who is level 9 and only trains 22 hrs a week - she's naturally talented and theres nothing wrong with her being so advanced at a young age (she has all level 10 skills already). However my mum constantly gets comments like if she trained more hours she would be a future olympian etc. Its a mindset ppl have that they have to train many hours when young to have a chance in the sport!

 

[gymjunkie]

I am so sorry that you went through all of that. You can call me naivete if you want to, I don't mind. I am not blaming only your parents for what happened to you. I just think that parents are too quick to point fingers in these situations. I think the well being of my child is first and foremost my responsibility. A responsibility that I take very seriously and refuse to make excuses on. I think if more parents were hyper alert and refused to participate in an abusive enviroment then it would not be as common. I'm not saying it will never happen to us... that would be naive. I am only saying that I am going to do anything and everything to avoid it and I also think parents should old some of the responsibility for the abusive cuture in gymnastics.

I wasn't using the word naïve in an insulting way, because there is no way not to be naïve about the sport if your daughter is 7. Keep in mind, it's not just children who are groomed for abuse, it's parents as well. Yes there are parents who clearly push their kids into this abuse or look the other way, but I am talking about the ones who do not recognize the abuse because true abusers excel at deception and manipulation.

 

[SupportingHerDreams]

I wasn't using the word naïve in an insulting way, because there is no way not to be naïve about the sport if your daughter is 7. Keep in mind, it's not just children who are groomed for abuse, it's parents as well. Yes there are parents who clearly push their kids into this abuse or look the other way, but I am talking about the ones who do not recognize the abuse because true abusers excel at deception and manipulation.

I get that parents are groomed too... I don't think the sport of gymnastics is the only place this behaviour happens. I think it is possible to be naive about the sport and still be very well educated on the process of child abuse.

 

[gymjunkie]

I get that parents are groomed too... I don't think the sport of gymnastics is the only place this behaviour happens. I think it is possible to be naive about the sport and still be very well educated on the process of child abuse.

It's probably the only sport where an aspiring 8 YO would be asked to work out 18 hours/week and have those hours increase to 22 hours by 9. It's the sheer number of hours away from family that makes it different.

 

[SupportingHerDreams]

It's probably the only sport where an aspiring 8 YO would be asked to work out 18 hours/week and have those hours increase to 22 hours by 9. It's the sheer number of hours away from family that makes it different.

I understand that, but the basic principlas of child abuse are the same. As parents I think it is vital that we educate ourselves on what to look for and stay aware in every area of our child's lives.

Honestly I feel like all of these reasons for why abuse happens in gymnastics are excuses. there is no excuse for these things happening to children and I think it is the parents main responsibility to protect their child... If after some time in the sport I find that all of these excuses are true and it is impossible to protect my childchild at all then we will quickly quit.

I just feel that discussions about what we has parents can do would be so much more effective than finger pointing and quoting all these reasons why gymnastics is different.

 

[gymjunkie]

I understand that, but the basic principlas of child abuse are the same. As parents I think it is vital that we educate ourselves on what to look for and stay aware in every area of our child's lives.

Honestly I feel like all of these reasons for why abuse happens in gymnastics are excuses. there is no excuse for these things happening to children and I think it is the parents main responsibility to protect their child... If after some time in the sport I find that all of these excuses are true and it is impossible to protect my childchild at all then we will quickly quit.

I just feel that discussions about what we has parents can do would be so much more effective than finger pointing and quoting all these reasons why gymnastics is different.

If I had those answers, I would've given them right off the bat! It's very complicated because of the nature of the long hours and all of the other things I mentioned. How many hours does your 7 YO train?