Are we not all a little delusional when it comes to our own children and their sporting ability? I’m pretty sure we are. The reality is we sit at different points on that spectrum, and where we land can shift depending on the moment, the experience, or the circumstance.
Keeping any real sense of perspective is hugely challenging, especially once our children start looking like sporting mini-adults in matching kit, get picked for squads and performance programmes, and our patience starts losing ground to our expectations, particularly once someone tells us our child is talented and doing well.
The hardest part is staying genuinely objective, which is never easy given the sacrifices, cost and emotional investment so many families pour into their child’s sporting journey.
Delusional parents, in the truest sense, hold false or unrealistic beliefs about their children even when the facts say otherwise. Most of us sit somewhere far more balanced, with only a mild form of it. I’d include myself in that. There will always be more extreme cases too.
There does seem to be something built into us as parents that makes us believe our children are just a little better than they actually are. We can’t really help it, and if I’m honest, I feel exactly that way about my own children.
The problem comes when that delusion tips into something more extreme, because it genuinely hinders our ability to parent a young athlete well.
Once our expectations become unrealistic, we start putting unnecessary pressure on our children to hit a standard that was never realistic to begin with. Left unchecked, that tips into a pattern where nothing is ever quite good enough. Every mistake gets picked over, while genuine strengths and improvements go unmentioned. Everything needs balance.
Once our expectations run away from us, almost every selection, decision and interaction on any given day becomes about our child, and our own behaviour shifts to match. We grow critical of coaches and programmes, more desperate watching from the sideline, and then, often to make ourselves feel better, we unload every bit of feedback and feeling on the car journey home. Plenty of children we’ve spoken to in performance sport have told us what they actually need straight after competing is love, sleep and food — very few said they wanted to talk through what had just happened in that exact moment. That’s not to say those conversations don’t matter. They just tend to land better a little later.
All of this can quietly weaken the relationships that matter most around a young athlete that of the parent and coach, coach and child, parent and child, all of it.
When children feel they aren’t living up to what’s expected of them, and haven’t yet learned to take personal responsibility for their own enjoyment and improvement, they can start looking outward for someone to blame, a coach or a teammate perhaps rather than finding the passion and drive within themselves to keep going. Teenagers especially can be remarkably good at telling us exactly the version of events they know we want to hear, if it means avoiding a longer, harder conversation.
None of this is to say one side is always right. There are genuine moments where we need to step in as sports parents — behaviour that’s clearly inappropriate, something happening to our child we don’t understand, real concern about a lack of progress. That’s entirely our right, and we shouldn’t suffer in silence if something genuinely doesn’t sit well.
So how do we stop our own built-in delusion creeping into how we parent, and into our children’s sporting development?
It starts with being honest about why we put our children into sport in the first place. We don’t have a crystal ball. The younger the child, the less accurate any prediction about what comes next is likely to be and if any of us had a genuine formula for producing world record holders or professional athletes, we’d already be extremely wealthy.
We should be putting our children into sport so they enjoy the experience, and so they build the character traits that let them thrive in it, whether or not they ever reach an elite level and thrive just as much in whatever they choose to do afterwards. Sport remains one of the safest ways to build all of that.
In our own sessions, we focus on commitment, determination, consistency, resilience, patience, humility, adaptability, decision-making, self-organisation and good communication, among others.
If your child’s sporting environment genuinely delivers enjoyment, values them as a whole person, and builds these traits alongside the technical side of the game, that’s everything we should be hoping for. We should be delighted.
