It can be hard to know how much guidance, advice, and support your children may need in any aspects of life. When is it time to let them figure things out on their own? When should you step in? When does making decisions “with” them become making decisions “for” them? These questions might become even more challenging when your child is also an athlete. How much should you help your children with their sports? And how much should be the coach’s responsibility? Further, what aspects of your relationship should shift as your child finishes high school and enters college and emerging adulthood?
When children are quite young it seems easier, and sometimes necessary, for parents to be there to support their child’s athletic growth. Parents are needed for a student’s success (or their attempts) when it comes to Little League, soccer, gymnastics, and other sports in elementary-school sports. You need to help them dress, remember their equipment, and transport them to the location. Often, parents are the only audience to cheer them on. However, things are different when children reach emerging adulthood (around ages 18-25). At that point, it can be difficult to know your role as a parent, especially if your children have been athletes for many years. Researchers have looked at healthy parenting and setting boundaries. They have found that parents’ relationships with their student-athletes center on three overarching factors: communication, contact, and expectations.
Communication
Parent-child communication is closely related to feelings of self-efficacy in children, teens, or young adults. Self-efficacy refers to an individual’s belief in their ability to successfully accomplish a goal–and that ability that is very important for athletes. Young people need to learn how to set goals, how to reach those goals, and how to judge their success at reaching their goals. Those are all things that athletes do over and over. And parent-child communication can influence that goal-setting significantly.
As the parent of student athletes, you probably love to cheer your children on. Some parents pile on the praise, while other parents like to focus on what the children can do to improve. But one of the best ways you can build your children’s sense of self-efficacy is by encouraging your children to evaluate and celebrate their own progress in both athletics and academics. To do that, parents need to learn to be careful with praise and critiques. Praise feels good, but when parents praise too much, children may become dependent on that good feeling coming from other people. You might think you are helping when you provide critique. But they might think they never do anything right. They might not trust their own ability to know how they are doing. They might need you or their coach (or someone else) to judge whether something they did was “good” or “bad.” Here are some ways to encourage your children, not praise or criticize them.
- Own your own opinions. Let the children have their own opinions. Telling your children, “You did really well today,” is a judgment. It sounds like everyone should agree. Instead, say, “I was really proud of you today.” That is only your opinion, even if the children might not feel proud of themselves that day. Their disappointment doesn’t change how you feel. You can share your thoughts, and then you can ask, “How do you feel about your game (or performance) today?” Allow your children to assess whether something was good on their own.
- Healthy praise is not based on perfection, but rather on gradual growth over time. Help the children look for improvements. Look for things that went better today than yesterday or last week. Or compare it to last game or a previous performance. Celebrate things that were faster, more effective, or easier today.
Sometimes there will be a clearly bad day. Maybe the team lost badly. Or maybe your child made some big mistakes. It is hard to know what to say when that happens. Do not try to ignore the bad feelings or mistakes. That is not respectful, either. You can still encourage your children, though. Here are some ideas that might be helpful:
- “I could tell this was a hard day. I saw you frowning a lot. How are you feeling about it now? Do you want to hear what I thought you did best today?”
- “I heard you say you just want this day to be over, but I was glad I could be here with you today, anyway. I like to see how you handle things when they get tough.” You could also ask how your young people are helping their teammates get through the bad day.
- “I understand having a bad day. Tell me more about those feelings from your perspective. Was there one thing you felt you did well—or at least ok? What do you plan to do differently next time? How can you support the team?”
Note that it is important to let your student athlete know it is okay to have a bad day—or several bad days. The phrases like the examples above can help. They tell your children that you value their assessment of their performance. You are also saying that you love them when they win and when they lose. Let them know that all feelings are okay. They just need to learn how to deal with those feelings. And being in competitive sports means that someone will win and someone will lose. It is part of the picture. They just need to learn how to deal with winning and losing with dignity and respect. This is something they need to learn as an individual and as a team.
How can parents help their young person take that healthy approach? First, focus more on effort rather than wins or losses. Student athletes can control how hard they work. They can increase their effort. That is a goal everyone can reach, even if they don’t win. They also can learn to celebrate the good things that their teammates and other athletes did.
Also, parents can encourage student-athletes to use positive self-talk. Talk more about what went right than what went wrong.
Examples of ways to encourage positive self-talk:
- What were some highlights from today?
- What did you feel went the best in today’s game?
- What were some ways you succeeded today?
Parents themselves can remind the students that they believe in them. Finally, they can help the students use success imagining. That means, they and the students can learn to create detailed pictures in their heads of what it will look like if they perform well and reach their goals. All these communication techniques should help your student-athletes increase self-efficacy and handle success and challenges with dignity and respect.
Contact
The next important factor is contact. There are many decisions to make in this area. What is enough contact, and when is it too much? It is probably no surprise that studies show that student athletes do best with parents who reach a just right level of contact. But what is that level?
At one extreme, you could do too much for your emerging adults. You may have heard of helicopter parenting. Those parents “fly in” like a helicopter every time their children have problems. Helicopter parents often make decisions for their children and intervene in their personal affairs. Those parents usually think they are helping their child to succeed. However, they might be limiting their children’s ability to develop independence and stunting their growth.
At the other extreme, parents might step back entirely. Athletes between 18 and 25 can look very grown up. Even in high school, young people might resist help. Parents might think the young adults can do everything on their own now. Or they might think that the coach is now in charge. Those parents can become detached, hardly involved at all in their children’s lives. Those young people might feel they have lost their secure base and might wonder if anyone really cares about them as a person, not just their sports ability. That distance by the parents also makes it difficult for the young people to build a sense of self-efficacy and confidence.
The bottom line is that emerging adulthood is a time of identity exploration, instability, self-focus, and optimism. It is considered a stage of being “in-between.” Young people are growing up and becoming more independent, but parental support is still important for the parent-child relationship. Parents should be conscious of when, and why they are offering support and guidance. Here are some helpful hints for finding the “sweet spot” of contact with student-athletes in emerging adulthood:
- Let the student-athletes make decisions on their own. Step in to help only if they need it. You might want to talk together about the choices they could make. But let the young people make the actual decisions.
- Listen to them. Ask how they are feeling. Do not judge. Do not feel like you need to fix everything. Step back. Provide help only if they ask for it.
- When young people ask for help, ask first what they have already done or tried. Ask what their goals are. Help them come up with ideas for solutions. Let them take action. Don’t do it for them. Your help should move from direct to indirect as they get older.
Expectations
We said earlier that self-efficacy includes setting goals. The goals that young people set for themselves are related to the expectations of their parents. We talked about ways that parents can encourage their student-athletes. That can make their performance stronger. However, parents also have the power to weaken a child’s performance if they communicate expectations that are higher than a child’s ability. The child might feel pressure to meet the parents’ expectations, but those are the parents’ expectations. The most effective goals are based on a person’s own motivation. Young people will do best if they set their own goals and then get support from parents when needed to perform at their optimal ability.
Being a student-athlete is often a very public role. The young people in that role often operate under intense pressure to perform well. High expectations for athletics can come from their coaches; teammates; community members, alumni, and other team fans; or from parents/guardians and other family members. Each of those people may hold different expectations, but many would like to see “wins” or “perfection” every time. Of course, those expectations are not realistic, and many athletes face severe and often invisible mental health issues due to that pressure. Even when student-athletes set goals for themselves, they need to be reminded to be realistic. They can think big, but they should not expect to win every time or be perfect.
Student-athletes deal with mixed expectations from others in relation to academics, however. People might think that young people are either athletic or smart but not both. Research has indicated that athletes struggle with being taken seriously in academics, especially in college. They may find it challenging eveb to see themselves as intellectual. Or maybe they and others expect that athletes just need to do enough to squeak by to participate in athletics. In many cases, though, student athletes do very well in both areas. Sometimes athletes need to have good grades to participate in sports. And sometimes the skills they learn in one area help them excel in both areas. Time management is critical to do both successfully. As the parent of a student athlete entering university, you must be prepared to help from afar while your child navigates balancing school, their sport, and their social life. Emerging adults do need to be independent and practice autonomy, but this is far more achievable when the child knows they have a solid support system to fall back on.
What can parents do to help?
- Help your children think about what is most important in their lives. Talk about their academic goals. Talk about their social lives. What else matter to them? Sports is probably not the only thing they do or care about. What else to they want to make room for?
- Help your children to set realistic goals for athletics (and the other areas). Let your children take the lead. Help the children think about their past behavior and successes. Set the goals based on where they are now. Help them think about what the next steps are. Remember that perfection is not realistic.
- Consider how the goals in one area of their lives affect the goals in other areas. Set goals that recognize the whole picture.
- Make sure the goals are things that the children can control. They cannot control whether a team wins. They also cannot control the scores that judges give them. They can control how hard they practice and how much effort they put into their performance. Hopefully, the wins and scores will follow. But some of that is beyond their control.
- Break the larger goals into smaller steps. They should be able to see progress in those steps daily or weekly.
- Talk about ways to respond to other people’s expectations. Help your young people remind other people that they appreciate their support. Then they can tell those people that they have set their own goals and maybe explain what those goals are. Sometimes other people need to be reminded that student-athletes have lives beyond athletics!
Sources
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- Erdner, S. M., & Wright, C. N. (2018). The relationship between family communication patterns and the self-efficacy of student-athletes. Communication & Sport, 6(3), 368–389.
- Lowe, K., Dorsch, T. E., Kaye, M. P., Arnett, J. J., Lyons, L., Faherty, A. N., & Menendez, L. (2018). Parental involvement among collegiate student-athletes: An analysis across NCAA divisions. Journal of Intercollegiate Sport, 11(2), 242–268.
- Otte, F. W., Davids, K., Millar, S.-K., & Klatt, S. (2020). When and how to provide feedback and instructions to athletes?—How sport psychology and pedagogy insights can improve coaching interventions to enhance self-regulation in training. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, Article 1444.
- Pauline, N. R. (2023). Exploring the relationship between academic and athletic parental involvement and expectations of secondary student-athletes (Publication No. 2795905710) [Doctoral dissertation, Robert Morris University]. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.
- Reed, K., Duncan, J. M., Lucier-Greer, M., Fixelle, C., & Ferraro, A. J. (2016). Helicopter parenting and emerging adult self-efficacy: Implications for mental and physical health. Journal of Child and Family Studies, 25(10), 3136–3149.
- Strength isn’t just physical: Exploring athletes’ mental health. (2025, October 17). Deconstructing Stigma.
- Wall, J. M., Pradhan, K., Baugh, L. M., Beauchamp, M. R., Marshall, S. K., & Young, R. A. (2020). Navigating early specialization sport: Parent and athlete goal-directed processes. Sport, Exercise, and Performance Psychology, 9(3), 371–389.
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