1. Ending Child Abuse in Youth Sports with Dr. Amy Saltzman Dr. Cam 27:07

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

 

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Cameron (Dr. Cam) Caswell, PhD, the “teen translator,” is an adolescent psychologist, family success coach, and co-creator of Thriving School Community, a revolutionary program designed for schools to improve student, staff, and parent well-being.

For over two decades, she has been helping parents build strong, positive relationships with their teens through improved communication, connection, and understanding. Dr. Cam is a TEDx speaker, host of the Parenting Teens with Dr. Cam podcast, co-creator of the “I Am Enough” teen 12-week workshop, author of Power Phrases for Parents: Teen Edition, and co-author of Improving School Mental Health: The Thriving School Community Solution.

Dr. Cam is the mom of a teen too, so she not only talks the talk, she walks the walk!