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Lainy's Team Blog

Parental Role

I arrived at the elementary school with a few minutes to spare. I walked into the gym and settled onto the bleachers just in time to see my seven-year-old batting off a tee. “Go Neo,” I said, giving him a little fist pump into the air.
He swung and missed the ball on the tee. The coach put it back up and he missed again…and again…and again. The kids waiting to field the ball started to talk and spin around, bored with the lack of action. I just wanted to run and grab that little guy and high-tail it right outta there. “You don’t have to do this,” I wanted to say. “You’re just not ready!” But, of course, I would not do that. I’d encourage him and he’d work through it and he would learn to make contact with that ball with time and with practice. In the long run, he wouldn’t even remember this terrible, awful, humiliating practice. I dropped my face into my hands and took a breath, then looked back up just in time to see his bat crack the ball. Relief coursed through me. “Good job, Buddy,” I called as he rounded first base.
Despite the last-minute success, as we walked to the car, Neo looked dejected, so I tried to sound especially up beat. “You did great,” I lied. “Such a good hit! Was it fun?”
“Yeah,” he mumbled with his head hung, eyes on the school’s tile floor.
“What was the best part?”
“I don’t know but I can tell you what the worst part was,” he said, stopping to look up at me. His giant baseball bag hung all the way past his tiny, seven-year-old knees. “When you put your face in your hands!”
Oh. My. God. He had seen me. He had seen me and he had taken my mannerisms for disappointment, for embarrassment. But nothing was more embarrassing than this, nothing more shameful. My cheeks flared red.
“Neo, I’m so sorry. I just felt so bad for you…”
“You were embarrassed of me!”
“No, no, no, no, no. Not at all. I just…it was hard to watch you struggle, Honey. I couldn’t bear it.”
“Whatever,” he said and kept walking.
There was nothing I could say to undo what he had felt in that moment so I stopped trying. The damage was done.
As a coach of 26 years, I am cognitively aware of the trauma that parents can cause their kids in sports. There are the overly pushy ones who question the coach right in front of the kid. There are the ones who think they know better than you despite never having done the sport let alone coaching it. There are the ones who force their kids to practice at home, looking up Youtube videos for solutions to their kids problems. There are the ones who question their kids in the car like investigators wanting to know about every turn at practice. And the ones who focus on outcomes like winning and medals, rather than personal growth and character development. These kids are the ones who get depleted of their love of the sport. The ones who quit. The ones who struggle to
maintain their composure in competition. They are rarely focused or enjoying the thrill of the game. Instead they are filled with worry or dread, worried they will make a mistake and upset mom or dad.
It makes me sad to witness this and trust me, I have seen it countless times but there is little I can do about it. Unfortunately, telling a parent how to parent their own kid is not part of my job description and I can only imagine how well it would go over if I tried—no matter how well my intentions.
The dangers in becoming overly involved in your kid’s sport go both ways. Analyzing every practice every turn, scrutinizing every correction, reading into every coach’s comment can turn you into a stress-cased nut bag. This stress will likely project onto your child, who is now a stress-cased nut-bag filled with worry that they might disappoint you, or God forbid, start to believe they are not good enough, just as they are.
In an article I read a few years ago entitled, “How not to be a Nightmare Sports Parent,” it says that the number one thing kids hated the most about their time in youth sports was the ride home with their parents. That stuck with me. How sad is that? How utterly, awfully sad.
In a place a child should feel cared for and safe, they instead feel interrogated and judged. Why do you think you missed that catch? Why do you think you fell off the beam? Even though these seem like harmless questions, they are tinged with criticism. They bring up a topic the child might not be ready to address or consider. They just want a mom or a dad, not another coach. They just want to go eat some ice-cream not break down the critical mistakes that may have cost the team the game. Even if you are smiling or proud, an athlete will still take their cues from the questions you ask, where your priorities and expectations lie, and your facial expressions.
Oops.
Look, I’m not perfect okay!
I admit I still make mistakes and I am a coach by trade. I know things. I want to use my knowledge to help, to teach a lesson. Without fail, my child gets upset, heated, or argumentative. Clearly, I have waded into waters that have not calmed.
Other times, I am my best self. The parent who says, “what do you want for dinner?” as they hop in the car. Or, “I had such a good day at work today. Three girls made their kip!” And here’s the magic of what happens: my son’s fight or flight response from competition will start to fade. His guard will come down, his heart rate will slow. As he returns to himself at rest, not himself as an athlete, he will start to open up…on his own terms, at his own time.
“Did you see my hit?” he might ask.
“I did.”
“I struck out, too.”
“That’s okay. Every batter strikes out sometimes.”
The discussion might happen over dinner, or two days later, but the point is, if you don’t push it, it will usually happen organically—if you trust it.
Trust is a key word here. We have to trust that our athletes want to do well, that they are trying their best. We have to trust that the coaches want to win (of course they do!) and are doing everything they can to create champions. Although you might want to interfere, it is important to know that your involvement rarely makes things better, in fact it’s usually the opposite.
As a parent, its not our job to fix everything for our kids, to interfere in THEIR activities, to explain the game they have chosen to play. SO, what is our role then, you might ask?? To drive. To fund. To encourage. And to support. Period. End of story.
Sit in the stands, cheer and smile. Our kids are watching.