La importancia de la salud mental en el deporte femenino

The benefits of sports for people are well-known. For girls, sports is an activity that can teach them commitment, how to concentrate under stress, how to relax, set and achieve goals, respect others, accept responsibility and failure, and how to be both gracious winners and losers. Extensive research has shown that physical activity and sport enhance girls’ and young women’s mental, psychological, and spiritual health in numerous ways. They have better health, fewer chronic illnesses, higher body esteem, reduced risk of obesity, healthier periods, stronger bones, and reduced cigarette and drug use.

Playing sports also helps girls do better in school, helping them be more organized and responsible. Because of sports, girls’ social life is enhanced, and community involvement is increased. Sports help girls in their careers, too. Playing sports allows them to develop leadership skills, self-reliance, and self-discipline. It teaches them to function as part of a team and work under pressure. Most important of all, sports help girls emotionally and psychologically. They tend to have a healthier view of life and themselves. They have higher self-esteem, better self-image, more self-confidence, and lower rates of depression and risk of suicide. And yet, girls and women confront challenges both in sport and life that limit their potential.

Several studies have shown that despite formal guarantees of equality, the overall progress rate for girls, particularly those from impoverished communities, has been slow. While the forms of inequality may vary, girls are deprived of equal access to resources, opportunities, and power in sport (and otherwise) in every world region.

Reaching out to girls in their adolescent period is vital to confronting these issues. Inequalities of all types increase for girls during their period of adolescence. They experience restrictions while their male counterparts enjoy autonomy, mobility, and power. Naturally, all of this affects their mental health.

Constraining Women in Sport

The positive outcomes of sport for women are constrained by gender-based discrimination in all areas and at all levels of sport and physical activity, fuelled by continuing stereotypes of girls’ physical abilities and social roles. They are often segregated into different types of sports, competitions, and events specifically targeted at women. The value placed on women’s sports is lower, resulting in fewer resources and unequal wages and prizes. In the media, women’s sport is marginalized and often presented to reinforce gender stereotypes.

However, these are not the only challenges girls can face in sports. In today’s society, girls grow up looking at photoshopped or highly edited images of models, thinking that this is the ideal body shape they should have. They are growing up in a society where such unrealistic bodies are idolized every day in magazines, on tv, on

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