Spending some time working in the US this summer, I came across an article in the national press claiming that modern-day parents are raising the softest, most entitled generation of children yet, with expectations grounded in nothing close to reality.
Wow. Is that all of us, I thought? I really appreciate being lumped into one enormous group and labelled along with everyone else.
It got me thinking, though about my own parents, my own parenting, and the things I think we genuinely do better now, alongside a few things I don’t think we do as well as they did.
Is there some truth in that article? And what does it actually mean for how we raise young performers? Do we need to support athletes chasing the highest levels differently to the societal norms around them, given that the demands of performance itself haven’t really changed?
Modern parenting can often feel like coaching in a huge game. We feel under pressure, surrounded by competition, constantly told that if we don’t push hard enough, our children will get left behind.
Plenty of parents tell us about their late-night worries, the anxieties, the second-guessing, hearing that someone else is doing things differently and wondering if they’ve got it wrong. Sporting programmes can end up magnifying that pressure without meaning to.
Here’s the catch, though: some of today’s parenting habits, well-intentioned as they are, might be exactly the things we look back on and regret, if we haven’t properly thought them through. Here are a few that come up regularly in our sessions and there are plenty more besides.
Over-scheduling and overtraining
This is a tough one. The number one answer we hear when parents describe what makes sports parenting genuinely challenging is simply the logistics. To be clear, getting good at something takes real commitment, and at times it will feel relentless.
Some parents of children excelling young may not have much choice, depending on where they live and what their programme demands. Even so, it’s worth being wary that everything, taken across a full year, needs some balance. Family time, holidays, other hobbies and interests, alongside enough of the right kind of practice to keep making healthy progress in the sport they’re excelling at.
Plenty of the world’s top performers played several sports growing up, and there’s sound advice in not eliminating too many too early. Michael Jordan didn’t only play basketball as baseball featured heavily in his childhood too, and that variety is widely credited as part of what shaped him as an athlete.
Contrast that with Freddie Adu, once billed as “the next Pelé.” At just 14 he signed a professional contract, played under enormous pressure, and was on every magazine cover going. By 22, by his own account, he was burnt out and his love for the game had faded.
Parents often tell us, with hindsight, that they wish they’d slowed things down and made a few better choices along the way. Hindsight really can be a wonderful thing.
Defining success by trophies
Richard Williams, father and coach to Serena and Venus, was known for pushing back publicly against the idea that tennis was the whole story arguing, at various points in his daughters’ careers, that there was more to life than the sport, and that burnout could be as dangerous an opponent as anyone they’d face on court. Notice what’s missing from that view: trophies, rankings. Success, for him, was framed around effort, character and impact instead.
Compare that with parents who measure every season purely by outcomes. I’ve had teenage athletes tell me, “If I don’t score, I feel like I’ve let my parents down,” and “they keep asking me where I think I rank on the team.” That kind of pressure doesn’t build champions. It builds anxiety.
Raising young performers well means helping them understand why they’re winning, and why good outcomes are happening in the first place, which brings us straight back to character. That only develops if we, as parents, actively support it: shining a light on those traits, reinforcing their value, and genuinely talking about them.
The familiar sporting conversation of did you win, did you score, how did you compare to everyone else needs far more depth than that. If it’s the only conversation that ever happens around a young person’s sport, it simply reinforces the idea that success is only ever about the outcome.
Living through our child’s achievements
Andre Agassi, in his autobiography Open, recalls how relentlessly his father pushed him, even building a ball machine nicknamed “The Dragon” that fed him 2,500 balls a day. Agassi became a champion. He also admitted he hated tennis for much of his life: “I won matches. I earned millions. But I hated tennis.”
Plenty of modern parents fall into a similar trap, treating their child’s sport as their own second chance.
There’s nothing wrong with being proud of our children, or genuinely invested in their sport. Young athletes thrive when we support without controlling, when they know it’s genuinely their journey, and that we’re their biggest supporters, not a second coach standing over their shoulder. As children get older, moving ourselves from the driver’s seat into the pit lane is essential if we want to raise independent, self-organised, self-driven young people.
Forgetting the whole person beyond their sport
One conversation I always come back to with parents is this: what do you actually want your child to get from their sporting experience, and what will they do tomorrow if it all ends?
Children can be entirely invested in their sport, and that’s fine but it’s far easier to build a rounded person alongside that investment than to try to construct one at the very end, once the sport is gone.
Plenty of athletes have had every part of their life shaped around maximising their sporting future including meals, training, even friendships monitored, all supposedly in service of the goal. The pressure that builds under that kind of control has a real dark side, and it’s shown up publicly in the words of more than one elite athlete over the years, including swimmers and basketball players who’ve spoken candidly about losing their love for the sport under the weight of it.
We’re not fans of the “Plan B” narrative for young people as we don’t love how it’s often framed. What we are fans of is helping build multi-faceted young people with genuinely different strings to their bow.
Contrast this with Roger Federer, whose parents encouraged him to play multiple sports until he was twelve. He’s credited that balance publicly, many times, as central to both his longevity and his lasting love of the game, he wasn’t forced into tennis, which is part of why he still loves it today.
Parenting for the long game
Years from now, your child won’t remember every sporting day, or every outcome.
We live in this moment now, without a crystal ball for what’s ahead, and without any guarantee that whatever we give to their sport, and whatever they give to it themselves, will get them where they’re currently aiming. That’s a genuinely uncomfortable place to sit as a sports parent. Can we shift the narrative anyway?
What we probably can guarantee is that when it’s all over, they’ll remember how you made them feel. Did they feel valued, even after a mistake? Did they feel safe to fail? Did they feel supported beyond the game itself?
The real goal is raising a child who loves their sport, loves themselves, and carries those lessons into every corner of life beyond it.
