Mental Toughness: How Parents Can Support Young Athletes

Individual and team sports have many benefits for our youth. Sports can be physically beneficial, but can also present young folks with a platform for learning how to handle difficulty, how to work hard toward goals, how to work well with others, and how to problem-solve. At their best, sports can also help young athletes build mental toughness, self-esteem, a positive sense of identity, and can play a crucial role in the maintenance of mental health.

And while sports can present an athlete with challenges, so too can parenting a young athlete. How do I help my athlete fulfill their potential without pressuring them? What do I do when sports seem to be adding more stress than joy to my child’s life? How do I help my kid let go of mistakes they might make in competition? These are just a few of the many questions I’ve seen parents wrestling with during my decade of experience as a baseball coach, and a mental health care provider.

With these 6 tips and guidelines, I’m confident you can help your young athlete better tolerate failure, handle the emotional ups and downs of sport, respond to performance anxiety in constructive ways, and build a relationship with athletics that’s sustainable and won’t lead to burnout. Here’s how you can help your athlete build mental toughness.

Normalize anxiety in competition, and reframe it for your kid as a “sign that you care.” It’s quite normal to feel anxious when we’re about to do something that really matters to us. The worst thing we can do in these situations is to try to fight our inner experience by saying “I shouldn’t be feeling this way,” as now we’re focused on combating anxiety, instead of being in the present moment of competition. Common refrains like “don’t worry about it,” “you’ll be fine,” or “you’ve just got to be mentally tough,” can unintentionally reinforce a message that “you shouldn’t be anxious.” I’ve worked with so many young athletes over the years that believe the presence of anxiety is a sign they won’t play well. Dispelling this myth, normalizing anxiety, and reframing it as a sign they care, can do wonders for a young athletes’ mental toughness.

Don’t punish your kid for physical mistakes/errors. There are many ways parents may punish their kids for mistakes made during practice or competition. Yelling at your kid from the stands is an obvious form of punishment, whereas a stern post-game conversation on the car ride home can be a more subtle form of punishment. If your kid comes to expect that a tough game will be met with yelling, lecturing, or excess coaching from their parent, they’ll be more afraid of future failure. Consider this: physical errors/mistakes are an inherent, crucial aspect of any skill-building process. Whether we’re learning to throw a baseball, speak a new language, or play a new instrument, we have to make mistakes in order to build skill. Too many kids today are fearful of making mistakes, and this is often a byproduct of the behavior that’s modeled by their parents and coaches. What can you do instead? Normalize the struggle of skill-building by encouraging your kid to seek out challenges. Explain that learning to deal with challenges is a crucial aspect of becoming a good athlete. Without challenge we cannot progress in the skill-building process. When your kid doesn’t get the outcome they want, remember that they’re probably more frustrated than you are. The best thing you can do at that moment is support them, and only offer feedback if/when it’s asked for.

Model a focus that prioritizes process over results. Youth athletics today are increasingly focused on results. Wins and losses, statistics, etc, are often emphasized over more important aspects of sport such as character-building, learning to be a good teammate, understanding how to cope with failure and disappointment, and cultivating the ethic of hard work. If you’re overly focused on the results, your young athlete will be too. Instead, helping them identify aspects of their performance they can control and work with them to set goals that are process in nature. For instance, “I want to swing at good pitches today” is a better goal than “I want to get 2 hits today,” because we have complete control over the pitches we swing at, whereas we could hit 2 balls hard and still end the day hitless. Similarly, focusing on things like our mental approach, our effort, our energy, and the way we treat our teammates can give us more of a sense of mastery over our own sports experience. If we’re too focused on outcomes, we’re more prone to the emotional ups and downs of perceived success/failure. As a parent, it’s important to examine what your focus emphasizes: is it on the process, or more on the outcomes? If you can direct focus more toward the process, your child will be likely to follow suit.

Don’t coach from the stands! If you are a spectator at your child’s sporting event, your job is to support, not to coach. Attend a youth sports tournament, and you might be shocked by the amount of advice being yelled from the stands: “keep your eye on the ball,” “watch the curve!,” “get your head in the game!” are all classic refrains at youth sporting events. Unfortunately, these comments have little to no positive impact on your kid’s performance. Hitting a ball, making a basket, or throwing a strike is already hard enough. Factor in multiple voices from the stands yelling a multitude of different things, and it’s darn near impossible. This can also be confusing for kids as they may wonder, “should I be listening to what my coach says, or what my Dad says from the stands?” Kids play their best when they’re in the flow of the present moment, not when we’re deciphering loads of advice being shouted by parents. What can you do instead? First, trust the coach to do the coaching. Some coaches are better than others, but often the coach has already worked with your kid on the very thing you might be yelling. Second, ask your kid whether they want to hear your voice during the game. Some kids love to hear their parents cheering. If so, great! Focus your energy on being supportive and cheering them on. Other kids would prefer to hear nothing from their parents, as they find it distracting. If your child feels this way, honor their wishes!

Help your young athlete build a well-rounded identity that is bigger than sport. If your child’s identity is too wrapped up in sports, they’ll be more prone to feeling like a failure when they don’t play well. This also makes young athletes more vulnerable to the emotional impacts of injury. If sport is all they have, and they’re sidelined due to injury, that can be even more difficult to cope with. However if sport is just a piece of their identity, then failure/injury/disappointment can be easier to tolerate. One way to think of identity is like a house, and each piece of our identity represents a room in the house. We may have a room for “basketball player”, a room for “musician”, a room for “student”, a room for “debater”, and a room for “friend.” If our identity is mutli-faceted, we can handle disruptions to one of our rooms because we have other places to seek refuge. This is one example of what mental toughness can look like! However if we have a one-room house of “athlete” and an injury makes it so we can’t play our chosen sport(s), it can feel like the house, our identity, is in shambles. As parents, we can work to make sure we’re supporting our kid’s engagement in activities beyond just sport, while reminding them that their performance on the field is not a reflection of their worth as a human being.

Build awareness of your own hopes and dreams for your kid’s athletic career. It’s important for parents to take stock of their own expectations for their child’s athletics, and the expectations they may be putting on their child’s athletics career. Perhaps you played high school or college sports, and have always dreamed of sharing your love for sport with your child. Or perhaps you’re high-achieving in your field, and place similar expectations on your young athlete. While instilling values of hard work and ambition are important, it’s also critical that your child’s athletic career is truly their own. When a parent’s emotional-well being, hopes, and dreams hinge on their child’s athletic performance, that young athlete has become saddled with enormous pressure. In my experience as a coach, athlete, and therapist, this relationship to your child’s athletics is a surefire way to cause burnout, relational strife, and resentment. Instead, work to prioritize your child’s intrinsic motivation for sport. Listen to your child, support their hopes and dreams, use your self-awareness to identify how their dreams, values, goals, and desires may differ from your own.

Parenting a serious athlete is no easy task. It’s normal to want your kid to experience success, and in competition, success can be hard to come by. Understandably, watching your kid struggle can bring up all sorts of parental questions and challenges. If these are issues you’re struggling with, you might consider talking with a therapist, counselor, or sports psychologist who can help you and your child work through these struggles. If you are willing to make changes to your parenting style in ways that better suit your kid, your child will appreciate that more than you can imagine. In doing so, you can redefine your relationship with your child, while helping them build a lasting, sustainable relationship with sport and competition.