Youth Sports and Intensive Parenting: Travel Soccer Confessions
Have you noticed? Youth sports has been swept up in the intensive parenting tsunami, becoming yet another symbol of our status and success as parents while wreaking destruction on family life, family budgets, and even the love of the game. I have gone on record in my piece, Youth Sports in Overdrive, that youth sports has ballooned from a character-building pasttime to a pressure cooker that dangerously pushes kids past physical and emotional limits.
AND.
A few months ago, my 8-year-old son announced his plan to try out for travel soccer.
Opposing thoughts and emotions battled in my brain. On one side: is our family ready for “club” soccer? Am I a complete hypocrite? I also worried – what if he didn’t make it? How would he handle the rejection? How would I handle the rejection? On the other side: I adore this mighty child’s fierceness on the field and passion for the sport. I wanted to support him in taking a risk.
Most alluringly, I also saw this pursuit of soccer excellence as a potential path to social and emotional protection. Even though he hasn’t even started fourth grade, I have glimpses of my son’s petite physicality putting him at risk in middle school. If he had the social protection of teammates and the emotional protection of confidence in his athleticism, maybe he could avoid becoming a bully’s target.
All of this is why every time I thought about my youngest, smallest child trying out for travel soccer, I felt my chest tighten and my mind race. So much felt wrapped up in this hour and a half of putting himself on the line.
The Pressured Parent Phenomenon
Apparently, it’s not just me. Autonomy-supportive researcher and author, Wendy Grolnick, has coined the term Pressured Parent Phenomenon. It describes what happens to our brain and body when our children are in competition for any marker of “success.” She explains, “It’s an internal pressure so strong that we can’t rest until our child feels safe—has gained admission to that certain magnate school or won a spot in the school orchestra.” Or made it on the soccer travel team. For 8-year-olds.
The problem is that this unharnessed evolutionary drive or biological response to watching our kids compete can make us quite controlling.
The most obvious evidence of this are those unhinged sports parents I’m sure most of us have met. I will never forget the parents who became downright frenzied cheering on a superstar kid playing indoor soccer. This occurred in a casual, recreational winter program to just give third-grade kids a chance to play soccer while it’s snowing outside. There were no teams. The so-called coaches functioned essentially as adult bodies cycling kids on and off the field without actually coaching any skills. Yet, these parents cheered as if Lionel Messi were on the field. As these indoor soccer super fans personify, leaving our evolutionary impulses unchecked can end up as protective instincts gone haywire.
Proceed (and Play) with Caution
But it doesn’t have to be as obvious as over-involved sideline parents yelling commands at their child or the ref. We can be controlling without even realizing we are doing it because we get caught up in social comparisons and feeling the pressure to make sure our child keeps up athletically.
We need to be careful of two key risks:
1. Inadvertently giving our kids the message that our love is contingent on them winning and excelling in their sports performance.
2. Pressuring our kids to be competitive and excellent, causing them to feel external pressures and ruining all the fun of competition while eroding their internal motivation.
The answer is not to burn it all down of course because sports involvement has a myriad of benefits for kids. We just need to stay out of the way and also watch how our kids are responding to their coaches and teams.
In his recreational soccer league, my son’s love of the game grew with each season as he had the good fortune to play with positive and encouraging coaches and teammates. In his most recent season, we witnessed the downsides of a more competitive coach and teammates mostly focused on goals and winning. They didn’t have as much fun. And they lost more. My son stopped constantly practicing at home as his soccer light observably dimmed.
The End . . . and Just the Beginning
My favorite soccer star and I left his long-anticipated travel league tryouts with him exhausted from adrenaline and playing soccer continuously for an hour and a half, and me from my own worry and vigilance. When we got in the car, he said he had no idea if he made it. I agreed. I was proud of him for hanging in there through all of his nerves and I could see how seriously he took it on the field.
When I looked at his face, becoming more angled and less childlike by the day, I worried for his heart. He had taken a big chance on something important to him, and he might fail. I write all the time about how important it is to refrain from rescuing our children from failure, yet every part of me wanted to do just that for my son.
A few days later, he got the good news: he made the team! I felt the rush of relief and excitement for a few minutes before the reality sunk in: we are officially doing travel soccer. Now I feel like it’s even higher stakes for me to resist the pull of getting sucked in deeper to the dark side to help ensure that his inner soccer light keeps shining.
When it comes to our kids and sports, there’s obviously a balance to strike between support and pressure, between nurturing skill and demanding excellence. Next week, I will get into detail about how leveraging the benefits of sports and extracurriculars can be a fundamental part of a child’s growing sense of self and belonging. If we approach it with an autonomy-supportive mindset and strategies. If we can remember that our child is indeed safe on the proverbial savannah even if they can’t get the basketball in the hoop.
Because what the science shows us is that resisting our own internal pressures for our child to perform at the highest levels could actually make it more likely they end up doing so.
**You can pre-order my book Autonomy-Supportive Parenting: Reduce Parental Burnout and Raise Competent, Confident Children on Amazon and Bookshop.