Parenting a High-Performance Athlete: What You Need to Know

There’s no way around it: parenting a high performing athlete is not easy. Competing at the highest level comes with extreme highs and lows, the latter of which can be painful to watch from a parent’s perspective. After all, a parent is always looking out for their child’s health.

So, when a child appears to be visibly stressed or disappointed, it’s hard to tell when to offer advice and when to just stand by and listen. Determining when your input is needed is much easier when you know exactly what your child is going through, and why they are behaving this way. This will also help you understand how you can be a purely positive influence in your child’s athletic journey, not the opposite.

With this in mind, here are a few things parents of high-performing athletes can expect from their children, and how they should respond:

The Pressure is Real

High performing athletes tend to have big goals, like playing college sports or going pro. Due to the fact that soccer is global, that means there is an amazing amount of competition for a few spots at the top.

It’s important for parents to be aware of the incredible standards their children are trying to meet. For instance, your child may ask you about undergoing additional training on top of their regular practices with their club team. They may start doing rigorous workouts at home, when the other kids are playing video games.

Rest assured, your child isn’t working this hard because they want to “look cool” or “fit in.” They aren’t making up these high standards.

The standards are real, the pressure is real, and your child’s decision to train extra hard is a logical response to the challenge before them. So, don’t belittle their training habits or question why they seem “obsessed” with training even if you think they don’t have what it takes and need a plan b. If your child’s life seems out of the ordinary, it’s because they have an extraordinary goal to meet, and that often requires a change in lifestyle.

They are Already Getting Plenty of Criticism

When your child has a bad game, it’s only natural to want to help. There will be many times when you will want to tell your child what they did wrong and how they can do it right the next time.

But that’s not necessarily what they need from you as a parent. Often, it’s the exact opposite.

Odds are, your child is already getting plenty of criticism from their coach, their teammates, and themself. If they make a mistake, they don’t need to be reminded of it. What they do need from you is unconditional love. Children want to associate their parents with hugs, smiles, support, etc. If anything, they need to be reminded that their parents’ love for them has nothing to do with how they perform athletically.

If they had their parents around, a lot of the top athletes have a similar story: their parents were completely unperturbed with how they played. They went out for ice cream after the game no matter whether they scored a hat trick or scored an own-goal that lost them the tournament. One piece of advice that’s stuck with us as parents: you are allowed to criticize your kid once per day. If it’s how they fold laundry, that’s your one for the day. It helps build that positive relationship, boosts their self-esteem, and strengthens their inner-resiliency.

How Parents Are Evaluated Too

At the elite level, all the players are talented. So one of the differentiating factors coaches ask about – and yes this is true for both pro academies and college programs – is the player’s family.

They want to know if their parents yell a lot at games, if they coach from the sidelines, if they get in yelling matches with other parents. These coaches are building a team, and if all other aspects are equal, the attitude and demeanor of the player’s parents is often a determining factor. As mentors to lots of players at pro academies who are often looking to play in college, we get asked about the player’s family often.

Focusing on being a parent is hard enough, much less being their mentor and their coach at the same time. If you want to keep your relationship with your athlete in that one lane, let’s set up a mentoring session so we can help them establish an elite mindset to go along with their talent on the field.