Parental achievement orientations and parent-perceived child Well-being in competitive youth swimming: A qualitative study with parent in Türkiye

Parents shape the daily relational environment in which their children participate in competitive sport, and this environment is understood as a family-level resource that can both protect and threaten children’s psychological well-being. Yet how this environment is built during everyday life remains poorly documented at the process level. We examined how parents of young athletes competing in national swimming competitions described sacrifice, success, failure, and the organization of family life, and what these accounts might tell us about the athletes’ motivational worlds. In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 parents (7 fathers, 5 mothers), and the data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis informed by McClelland’s achievement motivation framework and self-determination theory. Four interrelated themes were constructed from the parents’ narratives: the meanings that parents from different socioeconomic backgrounds attach to sport; a sacrifice–obligation dynamic in which parents described their investment as generating a felt sense of indebtedness in their children; the differentiation of parental roles after competitive failure; and a markedly unequal distribution of visible and invisible family labor, made explicit through parents’ descriptions of how daily life was reorganized around training. Because only one parent from each family took part and no children were interviewed or assessed, the narratives reflect parents’ perceptions rather than observed family processes or measured child outcomes. The motivational interpretations offered here are therefore best understood as analytically constructed propositions, not findings about children. In this sense, the study identifies narrative and relational processes at the family level as possible targets for family-centered support and protection work with young athletes, and points to what a multi-informant design should test in future research.