Opinion
It happens to all of us at some point in parenting: we have to reckon with the least refined sides of ourselves.
I’ve nudged against mine on a couple of occasions. One was the urge to be a sports tiger parent.
Several years ago, when my eldest started sport I assumed she’d be as into it as I was as a kid. For me, sport was life, and it was assumed that for her and her sister, it would be too.
I thought I’d be a supportive, relaxed sport parent because mine were. Also, I’d seen the aggressive parents at my brothers’ games. The dads who hurled abuse and needed to be escorted from the sidelines. I’d also had more than one friend plead with their parents to stop being belligerent at our netball and cricket matches.
There were also the pushy parents, the ones who scolded instead of encouraged their resistant, worried kids, and the ones who stonewalled their child when they didn’t win.
I didn’t want any part of it.
So, having to muzzle my own competitive urges as a parent took me by surprise.
When my sweet, sensitive 5-year-old started playing soccer, she was Ferdinand in the field smelling flowers. She wasn’t interested in the ball and there was no killer instinct in sight.
Instead of marvelling, I felt a sharp pang of disappointment.
Other sports we tried weren’t her thing either. She hated being out in the hot sun, and preferred walking and handstands to running and competition.
I didn’t need to say anything. Where others are loud about it, quiet disappointment – invisible from the sidelines – is felt just as keenly by the kid.
Later, I tried to reconcile my reaction with the kind of parent I wanted to be.
I hoped sport would be something we bonded over. It had given me a sense of freedom and power and confidence in myself. I wanted her to have the same experience. But, I realised that so long as she found that feeling in some area of her life, it didn’t matter what it was.
I learned my lesson, I let it go, and I cringe looking back. Now I’m a woo sports mum. Win, lose, whatever. I want them to enjoy themselves.
But, in the years since, I’ve become increasingly conscious of how many parents could also do with a bit of muzzling and a reality check.
There are the offhand remarks about their own sporting prowess and disbelief at their child’s lack of it; the frustration that their kid is mucking around instead of being ‘serious’; the passive aggression and the laser focus on winning and being the best.
No wonder one in four Australian kids (and around 50 per cent of kids with a disability) quit sport by 15.
We’re not making it fun. We’re not even giving them a chance.
How we perform as children rarely predicts how we will perform as adults. This is true not just for sport.
A review published in Science in December sought to understand the origins of talent: Did the best athletes, scientists, and musicians reach peak performance relatively early or late in their careers?
They analysed 34,000 adult international top performers in different domains, including Nobel laureates, the most renowned classical music composers, Olympic champions, and the world’s best chess players.
In each domain, there was about a 90 per cent difference between those who excelled in a given area as a child and those who excelled in the same area as an adult. So only 10 per cent of those who dominated as children went on to be the best as adults.
Most top achievers demonstrated lower performance than many peers during their early years, the authors said.
Why?
They suspect it’s a range of things: pursuing different interests young increases the likelihood of finding what we truly enjoy and what we are good at later; Different activities allow us to develop greater adaptability and a broader skill set; With less pressure and more play, there is the chance to experiment and find our strengths; The kid who is dabbling at several activities may not initially perform as well as the one practicing a single activity six days a week. But delaying specialisation until later decreases the risk of burnout and injury.
This was certainly the case for Jess Hull, one of the most decorated track athletes in Australian history.
Last year, the 29-year-old Olympian told me she never had the fancy gear growing up (she ran barefoot) and her parents weren’t living their dreams through her.
“We didn’t try and win when I was 14-15,” said Hull, who was eight years old when she started athletics. “We celebrated PBs and progress.”
She attributes her sustained success today to the fact that she was not pushed to peak too early.
Understandably, parents want to give their kids every opportunity. But sometimes we have to recognise when our own ambitions are getting in the way. Sometimes it’s not the kid who needs to differentiate from the parent, but the parent who needs to differentiate from the kid.
All the focus on specialisation and optimisation doesn’t set our kids up to succeed: it just takes the joy out of being young.
“In the age of hyper parenting, where we are heavily invested (arguably overinvested) in our kids’ sporting, academic and social lives, it’s common to view their achievements and ‘failures’ as a reflection of our efforts,” says psychologist Paige Hill. “If we invest a lot of time/money/effort/petrol, we can mistakenly think we are owed a result.”
She adds that it’s healthy to encourage the next generation, but unhealthy when we push our kids to be what we failed to be. Ouch.
If we really want to help our kids, top performance coach and bestselling author Steve Magness has some choice advice: Chill out. Let them play, explore their talents and figure out on their own what they want to sink their efforts into.
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Sarah Berry is a lifestyle and health writer at The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect via X or email.
