ABSTRACT
This chapter is about children’s motivation in sport. It summarizes their reasons for participating or stopping, then focuses on their achievement goals. The first part is about what children think success is. It outlines the great variety in their views, then examines the most common goals in more detail and considers how they can be met. It shows how some kinds of goals make it easier to feel successful than others, and it explains how goals change with age, and how boys and girls tend to choose different kinds of goals. The second part is about why children leave sport. It describes how dropping out is linked with different types of goal, then explains how children’s judgements about their ability change, how goals have different time scales, and how sport becomes less attractive than other activities. A general recommendation is that coaches encourage children to set task mastery or process goals, to improve their feelings of success.
