In the therapy room, I typically work with young adults and adults struggling with anxiety—clinical cases of panic disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, and generalized anxiety disorder to name a few. Though treatment is generally focused on present thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, our work often delves into our understanding of early childhood experiences. We explore traumas, discover influential messages of self-worth, identify our core values, and reflect on our strategies to recover, for better or worse, from emotional wounds. Often we discover that our anxiety was born out of helpful function— to alert us to social risks, avoid experiencing failure, and motivate us to problem solve. We relied on this for so long because anxiety, while difficult, is often the preferred experience to scarier emotions such as vulnerability and shame.
I am at the life stage where I find my young kids entering the competitive sports world, so this blog post is an opportunity to bridge my professional life with my personal life. Through my experiences as a coach and a parent, I’ve been reflecting on how we can take advantage of the many opportunities youth sports provide to best prepare our children to build resilience with shame and cope with anxiety, and therefore become adults who can navigate emotional ups and downs in healthy ways. Brene Brown, the well-known shame and vulnerability researcher, states “There’s nothing more vulnerable (than sports). The definition of vulnerability … is uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure. Every time any athlete in any sport takes the field, you are vulnerable”.
So after you scramble together their gear, coordinate the weekly schedule, and pack those dinners for the car rides to the field—take some moments to consider how we can help our children navigate the inevitable vulnerability and build skills for emotional resiliency.
1. Understand your child’s developmental stage. In our excitement to teach our children the correct technique, sometimes we struggle to break it down for our kids. I often see well-meaning adults give 6-7+ instructions at a time to a young child: “Pull your arm up here, step with this foot, then follow through with your wrist, make sure to keep your head up.” While all may be helpful steps independently, collectively this is overwhelming and sets our child up to forget a few. Even if it means they do part of it “wrong”, for a while, try to recognize where they might get lost in your instructions. Age-appropriate direction gives them a feeling of competency as they master each one, rather than feeling defeated when they can’t incorporate all of your directions at once.
2. Validation is your superpower. In the 1-2 hours of a single game, our young athletes will experience a concentrated volume of ups and downs: Anxiety, excitement, pride, disappointment, jealousy, anger, and joy. Just as we adults may experience the roller coaster of watching the rise and fall of our favorite team, our children are experiencing it for themselves without the life experience and maturity that comes with adulthood. What do they need from us? To feel seen, to feel believed, and to help them put language to their emotional experience. Even though it may seem obvious to us, be ready to reflect out loud for them: “I know it feels disappointing to lose.”, “It is okay to feel nervous when it’s your turn, I would feel nervous too.”, “You are so proud that you played well today! I am proud of you, too!”, “I know this bump/bruise hurts, I believe you. Take a minute to take some deep breaths.” Try to avoid offering judgment on the situation, and simply reflect back what they appear to be feeling. Without your validation, they will get stuck in the turmoil of trying to convince you of their experience—delaying their ability to bounce back.
3. Create your mistake-response plan. Errors are inevitable. Be mindful of how you want to respond to their mistakes. Make a plan for this now! If it’s a mistake they’ve made the first time, validate first to reduce their potential for defensiveness, and then give the corrective information: “I know that ball was coming really fast and you felt scared, but try to keep your glove down on those.”, “It must feel tempting to kick the ball with your toe, but we get more accuracy if we use the side of our foot.” If it’s a mistake they’ve made many times (and I know how frustrating this can be to watch), try to resist the long-winded or harsh corrections. Oftentimes kids know exactly the mistake they made, and because they know immediately what mom/dad/coach is going to say, they are ready to deflect or tune out as a way to protect themselves from feeling shame. So choose a response that validates then builds them up: “I know that didn’t go how you wanted, and I know you know how to fix it. Let’s leave it in the past and focus on what to do next time. What are you going to do next?” This models not perseverating on a mistake, gets them to be the problem solver, AND reminds them that you are on their team and you believe they can do better.
4. Things may not go their way, and that is okay. We can practice, strategize, prepare, and play like the pros, and still the other team may outplay us.. Kids (and adults) can sometimes get stuck in black-or-white thinking (ex: I failed a test, so I must be dumb. Or, I can’t complete everything, so I won’t even start). So when things don’t go our way, let’s use this opportunity to bring awareness to the gray area and point out where two things can be true: We can play well AND still lose the game. I can make a great hit AND the other team can make a great catch. When we are beaten, it doesn’t automatically mean there is something we could have done better. Kids (and adults) who struggle to cope with a loss may revert to blaming the officials, insinuating cheating on the other team, or yelling at a teammate who didn’t pull their weight. Sometimes losing a game is not an injustice that needs corrected, we just have to model how to cope with agony of defeat.
5. The team environment matters. Our kids will spend a lot of time with their teammates. From the downtime in between drills, the active/intense time working together to achieve a goal, or the celebratory post-game soft pretzel. The number of minutes is impactful, and the opportunities to feel a sense of value, positive self-concept, and feel supported by others really add up! Unfortunately, if the team environment is negative, there is much opportunity for low self-worth, shame, and a self-critical internal dialogue instead. A healthy team environment is one that is supportive, empathic, positive, and motivational. We help them practice this by creating opportunities to give support: building a routine to give a teammate a fist bump after a strike out or a missed shot, modeling words of encouragement to each other after a tough play, or asking our kids to consider how a player must feel coming up to bat with 2 outs in the bottom of the 9th inning. In a toxic environment, our kids will build whatever coping skills necessary to survive it: fighting back, criticizing others, self-sacrificing behaviors, or reducing their effort. As adults, it is our responsibility to create mini-worlds for our kids that will best mimic how they will create healthy mini-worlds for themselves in the future: in their work, families, and friendships.
6. Remind them of the hard things they have already done. When anxiety spikes during intense periods of the game, our confidence can be shaken. All of the sudden, our anxiety tells us a story that we may not be capable. The ability to persevere and have confidence is not a quality that some have and some don’t. Rather, self-confidence is a quality that is developed and sharpened over time. A key factor in developing self-confidence is practicing feeling the feelings that occur during the challenge, and not just practicing the challenge itself. When we practice feeling the anxiety AND still do the hard thing, we learn that feelings are not facts, and we can build tolerance to anxiety. When your child feels anxious or overwhelmed at a sticky point in the game, remind them of a time they have felt this feeling before, that the feeling came and went, and they were still able to operate through the challenge.
7. Strengthen body awareness. Something that most of my adult clients wish they were taught as children was the connection between their brains and their bodies. In therapy we utilize top-down processing (or relying on our cognitive beliefs to inform us of what is happening in our bodies) as well as bottom-up processing (where we pay attention to sensory stimuli in our bodies and that gives insight into how we are feeling). Together, this gives us two opportunities for perception and therefore two avenues for feeling grounded in big emotions. Children can benefit from learning to identify these body cues in bottom-up processing: how shaky hands, avoidance behaviors, or racing heartbeat are all signals we may be feeling nervous about something. Here is a great opportunity to teach basic coping skills for anxiety (side note: A show of hands for the adults who were ever taught these skills explicitly? Me neither.) Some examples: taking slow deep breaths, finding 3 things in your environment that start with B, or doing some stretching to wind down from an exciting game to show our muscles it’s okay to relax now.
8. Build a relationship where they turn towards us, not away from us. Especially when they are just beginning their sports journey, our kiddos will look to us on the sidelines many, many times. They may be looking for your reassurance as they jump into something new. Or perhaps they’d like to share their joy with you or receive your looks of pride when something goes well for them. Maybe they are looking for your support when something didn’t go right, and they aren’t sure why. If we could sum up their needs with these looks it would be confirmation of connection. They need to know that when they make a mistake, they are still valued. Or when they did improve, we noticed. Our behavior during their practices and games will cause them to turn towards us or away from us, depending on what they learn to receive from us. Let’s do our best to teach them SHOW them that our love and approval is not based on their performance. We will welcome them in for connection even if they fail, and that we can be their consistent safe haven to return to during the ups and downs—in sports and in life.
When describing a successful sports experience, a child’s ability to bounce back and handle the emotional ups and downs is just as important as (arguably more important than!) the technical skills they learn on the field. I encourage you, as a parent or a coach, to capitalize on the many moments that youth sports provide. After all, our goal is not just to have a good player for a few years, but to help our young athlete develop into an emotionally healthy adult who is capable of navigating challenges through all aspects of life.
