6 Points to help the ride home after practice

I have worked with kids for over 40 years, and I have been witness to parents trying to talk to their athletes to be supportive on many occasions. I have seen the cold shoulder response, complete with eyeroll. I have seen kids break down their defense and open up. I have seen all points in between.  I will say that often times parents (myself included) feel awkward trying to talk to a child that may be on an emotion high after a great practice, or a low after a rough one.  Here are a few points to help us parents reinforce the parent to athlete relationship.

1. Consider your own mindset when trying to initiate the conversation. Have you been stressed at work or home or have you had a good day? Kids can feel our state of mind much more intuitively than other adults.  First step, check where you are coming from, emotionally.
2. Kids as early as 4 years old can detect false emotion. Saying something like “I don’t care how you did today, I love you just the same” is a great message. But the phrasing is cliched and will put a pre-teen or older child into defense mode.  Child behavior specialists will tell you how important it is to say this and I agree, but as a coach I can tell you that cliches and following expert scripts will have the opposite effect from what you were looking for.  Better yet, make a comment on how proud you are for effort, hard work, progress, or anything that will reinforce that you were actually watching.  Their effort is really the only thing that they can control. To compliment it means you value what they did and who they are.
3. Ask real questions. Try to avoid outcome-based questions like “did you finally do that skill?” Or “were you happy with your score?”  Avoid judgement calls like “why did you do that?” or “you look like that’s really hard for you, is it?” When you make summative judgments, you take the fun out of what they are doing and make it a test to pass or fail. Research shows that many kids leave sports because they feel they cannot live up to expectations. Reread point number 2. Praise the effort.
4. I love to hear parents asking their class kids “what was the best part?” It allows the child to evaluate the experience and pulls the positive up to the front of the mind. Often kids will focus on the struggle. They may say “I liked this part, but that part was really hard.” I would encourage keeping the focus on the effort and the positive and not to get pulled into the vortex of negativity.  Of course, you should acknowledge it, but no need to dwell. 
5. Don’t ask them if they had fun. Training in a sport can frequently be tough and for short spans it may not be fun at all (recalling two-a-day training in college). It may exhausting, be very difficult, or sometimes it may even hurt.  I like to ask my sons, when they tell me about the hard part, “what did you do to get past that?  Then I am sure to comment on the effort they put in, whether they accomplished it or met their limit.  From there I like to ask….
6. What can you do next time to “be better” to “avoid mistakes”, etc. This has to be reinforced as a good strategy regardless of what they say. The goal is to have them looking forward. Remember you are the parent not the coach.  If they ask, “do you think that is a good idea?” then the ball is in your court. Just remember that you are raising, not only an athlete, but a little human that needs to develop success habits, like strategizing, goal setting, and problem solving.

All in all, your goal should be to develop a thinking, feeling and hard-working person. Sports develop those traits, but you can reinforce them, or derail them. The choice is yours.  Many times, we start out with good intentions but might say the wrong thing at the wrong time. When I do this (and I do it a lot) I just try to steer back to safe ground. I’ll say, “well, I thought you were working pretty hard, and I always like to see that. You know if you need anything from me, that I am there for you, right?”  I rarely get a “whatever”.  Being a coach and having kids in sports is difficult at times. I must remember that I have 2 jobs and I can only do one at a time. Oh, and one is way more important than the other.