Professional athletes and their families face many unique stresses associated with geographic relocation, dramatic increase in income, and balancing the demands of the sport with family life. Often the athlete's spouse feels especially isolated without the advantage of team affiliation. The children may feel that the athlete is only a "part-time" parent. When the pressures become too great, the athlete and the family may benefit from a treatment program. This article presents a fictitious case, discusses the problems faced by professional athletes and their families, and suggests ways in which the athlete's physician can help. Indeed, the physician has the opportunity at the initial history-taking and physical examination to make the athlete feel that the physician's office is a safe place to discuss these problems and start resolving them.

POSITIVE RELATIONSHIPS

Good relationships are good for you and good for your children. It’s never too late to start working on improving your relationships.

People in supportive, loving relationships are more likely to feel healthy, happy and satisfied with their lives. They are less likely to have mental or physical health problems or do things that affect their health. People in good relationships help each other practically as well as emotionally. They share the good times and help each other through the tough ones. All relationships have challenging times.

Your relationship greatly affects your children as they grow up and become adults. Children will benefit from your efforts to enrich your relationship.

BREAKING UP CAN BE A HEALTH HAZARD

It often takes two years or more for a couple whose relationship has ended to begin to put their lives back together and recover from their emotional pain. Many people can develop serious health and emotional problems during this time. Financially, many men and women and their children are significantly worse off following separation and divorce.

GOOD RELATIONSHIPS

Good relationships involve:

• respect, honesty and trust

• love, companionship and shared activities

• mutual emotional support and intimacy

• communication

• agreement about finances, child raising and other matters important to you

• shared dreams for the future.

RELATIONSHIPS CAN CHANGE

Over time, people change in many ways including their interests, confidence and attitudes. Relationships can change when:

• children arrive and as the children go through various developmental stages and eventually leave home

• there are financial pressures

• work demands increase and responsibilities change

• one or both partners retire from work

• if you stop doing things together.

Some couples also face unexpected changes like:

• illness

• disability

• unemployment

• addiction problems

• living apart due to employment or family issues.

All changes bring their own challenges, but are easier to cope with if the couple relationship is solid and they can talk and work their way through the issues that concern them.

When it comes to training and competition, having the support of family, friends and teammates may just be an athlete's secret weapon to improving sports success on game days.

It may seem obvious that social support systems would help an athlete stick to a training program or eat a healthy diet, but does it really help you perform better during competition? Yes, it does, according to research on golfers.

Researcher Tim Rees reported that ongoing support of friends and family may be one of the most important factors influencing sports performance. He believes that the encouragement and support of friends and family is a key factor in building confidence in an athlete, and it's this confidence that can lead to success in a high-pressure sporting event.

For the study, Rees asked nearly 200 elite golfers about their social support systems. They were also asked about their confidence and levels of stress or anxiety. After analyzing the results, Rees found that during stressful matches, players with strong social support systems improved their golf score by one shot per round of golf, whereas the players with little social support actually played worse and added up to three shots per round to their total score.

Other studies also show that high levels of confidence can improve sports success. These studies raise some interesting questions about how confidence, or what the researchers call "self-efficacy," affects an athlete's success. Belief in one's sports ability is a large part of the drive that most elite athletes feel, but having a support system, made up of friends, family, a coach or a strong team is perhaps as important. In some cases, it appears to be the most important factor to an athlete's success.

So, if this is the case, how do you develop a strong network and support system? Here are a few tips.

How to Create a Great Support System On the Pathway to the Elite programs

• Ask for Support

  • This is probably the easiest way to find support. Share your goals and plans and then ask your family and friends to help encourage you to achieve them. Those closest to you are probably your biggest fans, but may not know that you want or need their encouragement.

• Hire a Coach or Personal Trainer

  • A good coach is your biggest support system. A coach takes care of details, keeps you focused, provides positive feedback, understands what you are going through and is completely invested in your personal success.

• Find a Training Partner

  • A training partner who is at your level, or even a bit more advanced, can be your best friend and confidant for sports. Seek out someone who will push you, encourage you and cheer you to the finish. Look for a training partner who is positive and encouraging and fun to be around.

• Join a Local Club or Group

  • Finding support doesn't have to mean working within your current network. Branch out and find new friends who share some of the same goals. If you run and want to run your best 10K, find a local running group that is active, consistent and working towards the same goals. You may find that these people are the same ones cheering you on to the finish line at your local fun runs.

• Lead By Example

  • Are you enthusiastic about your training workouts and competitions? If you grumble to your spouse, drag your feet to the gym and moan about your aches and pains to your friends, don't be surprised if they discourage you from participating in a sport that makes you miserable. If you want others to support you, you need to give them a reason to support you.

• Support Others

  • Another great way to build a support system is to provide support to others. Enthusiasm and encouragement can be contagious and encourage others to perform their best often results in them doing the same for you.

This article presents an application of attachment theory in understanding the quality of sport relationships, it describes types of motivational climate and the differences between performance and mastery in the family and also shows how the beliefs of parents can influence the beliefs of a young athlete. The high quality and positive relationships between athletes and their colleagues seems to reflect the early positive bond which they had with their parents. Children with insecure attachment styles more often have low quality relationships with teammates. Other factors important in the functioning of athletes are the two main types of motivational climate: the mastery/task climate and the performance/ego climate. Both kinds of motivational climate describe which values are the most important for parents and the different influence they have on athletes. Moreover the beliefs of parents have a big impact on the involvement in sport by children, their behaviour during and after sport competitions and what they think about their motor skills and abilities. Parents who care about the sport future of their children should be educated in how important it is to build positive relationships from early childhood, how their beliefs and values create a motivational climate which can support or harm an athletes participation in sport, and how their beliefs influence the involvement in sport of their children. Introduction For long time it is known that the family is the basic unit of society. The family’s influence begins with early childhood interactions and continues through adolescence and young adulthood. Parents are still likely to have the greatest single influence on the current and future behavior of their children. In this article a short review is presented of studies 118| Dawood Al Sudani et al:

FAMILY AND ITS ... concerning the most important factors connected with family and its influence on athletes. Attachment and qualities of relationships in sport. The quality of relationships in the family influences children’s development in various ways. The parent-child attachment style is a construct, which is a result of the initial attachment bond with the parent and can be a sort of template for future patterns of behavior, affect and cognition in other important and close relationships. In sport athletes are more likely to build relationships with coaches and each other, based on their attachment styles with parental caregivers.

In young people good early experiences enable them to develop a secure attachment style which helps to build a positive, internal perception of themselves and facilitates positive relationships in sport. Moreover the way young people build relations with other teammates or coaches reflects the bond which they share with their parents. Young people can also internalize some strategies, for example coping with stress, developed in early relationships and reproduce them in relationships with friends from their team (Jowett & Wylleman, 2006). According to Carr & Fitzpatrick (2011) children with an insecure attachment style in their bonding with parents are more likely to be viewed as difficult-to-like by players from their team and less likely to have highquality and positive relationships with their best colleagues in sport. The quality of relationships in sport children and adolescents can have is a big influence on the motivation for being physically active and participating in sport, and in helping individuals to cope with stress, isolation and anxiety and development of low or high self-esteem (Carr, 2012). That’s one of the reasons why the attachment style between parents and children is so important in their sports career. The quality of parental attachment bond shows that sporting relations can’t be developed in isolation from familial relationships. For improving and developing the secure attachment between sporting parents and their children, recommendations can be proposed to develop in children emotional and social capabilities which will be a benefit for their relationships and participation in sport. Motivational climate and quality of participation in sport. Some values are more or less important for the person concerned. Motivational climate is related to the parents’ own goals, the way parents evaluate and award their children and how they structure the task. There are two main types of motivational climate: mastery/task climate and performance/ego climate. Each of them reflect different values and belief systems (see Table 1). LASE JOURNAL OF SPORT SCIENCE 2014/5/2 | 119 Table 1

Comparison between performance and mastery climate performance climate mastery climate demonstrates superiority in comparison to others personal bests are here the main goal the most important is winning the most important is improvement and learning of new, useful abilities children feel controlled by their parents more authority is placed in hands of children award pupils with material rewards for demonstrating superiority and punish them reward their children for personal progress, learning and improving of their abilities The performance climate is created when a parent shows to his/her child that the goal is to demonstrate superiority in comparison to others and winning. The level of ability demonstrated by the child is the most important. Such thinking is seen as the race of competition. The performance climate makes children feel controlled by their parents who chose which sport the child will get involved in, for how long, in what order etc. Children or adolescents are not involved in the decision making process and usually receive more controlling and negative feedback for example “you must”, “I told you not to do that” etc. This kind of motivational climate is characteristic for parents who for example award pupils with material rewards for demonstrating superiority and punish them (verbally or physically). Performance climate is also connected with dictating the timing required for children’s development in skills and progress. The mastery climate is created when parent suggests to the child that the most important reason for participation in sport is improvement and the learning of new, useful abilities. The personal bests are here the main goal. More authority is placed in the hands of children. They can say what they want to develop/practice and what not. They also decide which kind of sport they would like to participate in. Because of this they are more likely to learn about their sport discipline and themselves. In mastery climate parents reward their children for personal progress, learning and improving of their abilities. Children or adolescents can control how much time they will spend 120| Dawood Al Sudani et al: FAMILY AND ITS ... on development of skills. This encourages important feeling of well-being such as autonomy and competence (Lorimer & Jowett, 2014). Beliefs of parents and involvement in sport.

The involvement of children in sport is determined by the parents beliefs and by how children perceive their parents beliefs. In longitudunal studies of children between 8 and 11 years researchers found that the mother and fathers beliefs about the value and utility of involvement in sport by the child explain beliefs about their children's competence and skills of sports. In other studies, it was observed that the beliefs of the parents were related to motivation for running in children and the level of performance during the running. In addition, children's beliefs, on how their parents approve of aggressive behavior in sport are associated with the intention of engaging in such aggressive behavior by children. Parents' beliefs about gender roles determine involvement in sport among children. The gender of the child seems to be the most important moderator of these relationships. Generally parents value the commitment to sport higher in a son than a daughter. They give more support to the sport activity of a son than a daughter. They also evaluate the sport competence higher in a son than a daughter. A stronger effect of gender appeared in adolescents than children of school age and when player participates in sport on competitive level. Beliefs of parents regarding the child's competence in sports are associated with the child's beliefs about his own skills and abilities and the level of sports performance sports. Beliefs of parents regarding the competence of children and adolescents connects with beliefs of children about their abilities. Stronger effects were found in fathers beliefs than mothers beliefs. Perhaps fathers beliefs are important because sports activity is classified as an activity for men. Studies conducted in children under 12 years of age showed that in this age group mothers play a key role in the beliefs about their sport competence (Łuszczyńska, 2012). Conclusions Taking everything into account to be a good athlete is seems to be useful to have in early childhood a positive bond with parents or caregivers, to grow up in a family where there is a mastery climate and there is personal development of motor skills and abilities and to have parents who believe in your competence and support your motivation for involvement in sport. There is no clear answer what kind of motivational climate is more important to achieve high results in sport competition. Perhaps performance climate can support winning but in the same time it can bring a lot of LASE JOURNAL OF SPORT SCIENCE 2014/5/2 | 121 negative consequences for young athletes.

Negative influence is also connected mainly with insecure attachment style and beliefs of parents that their child has low sport competence and is not good enough to participate in some kind of sport for example because of gender or low abilities. Parents' beliefs don't have to be real. The problem begins when the child's thinking also reflects the negative thinking of his/her parents. Sport psychologists and coaches should educate parents in how important a role they play in the life of young athletes and how they can support their sport achievements. References 1. Lorimer, R., & Jowett, S. (2014). Families In: A.G. Papaioannou, & D. Hackfort (Eds.), Routledge Companion to Sport and Exercise Psychology (pp.187-198). New York, USA: Routledge. 2. Jowett, S., & Wylleman, P. (2006). Interpersonal relationships in sport and exercise settings: Crossing the chasm. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 7, 119-123. 3. Carr, S., & Fitzpatrick, N. (2011). Exepriences of dyadic sport friendship as a function of self and partner attachment characteristics. Psychology of Sport and Exercise,12, 383-391. 4. Carr, S. (2012). Relationships and performance In: S. Murphy (Ed.), Oxford handbook of Sport and Performance Psychology (pp.400-418).New York, USA: Oxford Library of Psychology. 5. Łuszczyńska, A. (2012). Rodzina i płeć a udział w sporcie i kariera sportowa: psychologiczne determinanty. In: A. Łuszczyńska (Ed.), Psychologia Sportu i Aktywności Fizycznej (pp.189-204). Warszawa, Polska: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN SA. Submitted: September 15, 2014 Accepted: December 9, 2014