Jessica Lahey on successful sideline parenting

In order to be the kind of parent who can help a kid find the positive in the heartbreak, athletes, coaches and sports parents I have interviewed offer the following guidelines on how to be the kind of parent that your kids will want to ride home with, whether from their first T-ball game or a world championship final.

Be the parent, not the coach.

Unless your child’s safety is at risk, don’t yell from the sidelines, don’t criticize coaching decisions or referee calls in the car after the game, and don’t do any armchair coaching in the living room. Feel free to talk to the coach about ways to help your child improve, how your child behaves during practices or games, or ways to troubleshoot issues around injuries, but do not discuss other children on the team, team strategy, or your own child’s playing time.

Never, ever bad-mouth the coach in front of your child.

This destroys your child’s trust and respect and faith in his coach and creates a real emotional dilemma for your child. If he agrees with you, he’s betraying his coach, and if he agrees with his coach, he’s betraying you. Don’t put him in that position, Talk to – and about – the coach only when your child is not around to hear it.

Don’t ask your child to fulfill your own athletic dreams.

It does not matter how talented you were in softball, soccer, or chess when you were a kid; your kid is not you. Don’t be the parent who attempts to relive past glory or play out unfulfilled dreams through a child. Give him a chance to figure out what those dreams are instead of imposing yours on him.

Cultivate a mindset with plenty of room for failure.

Sports are hard, and only get harder as kids progress through the ranks. Caroline Leich, professional skier and extreme athlete, explained the transition from recreational athlete to professional athlete was hard for her at first because she was operating from a fixed mindset:

“I really had to change my mindset, because my parents had always told me I was great, and I’d never had to work at my sport. So with skiing, I thought there were things like ski jumps that I just could not do. I would see other people do these amazing (gymnist-type ski) tricks, but I figured since I have never taken gymnastics, so I simply could never do those tricks. I had to shift from what I can’t do to what I can do and I had to work really hard at it. That became part of the fun, to stay focused on the goal even when things get hard.”

Gleich has excelled at her sport because she’s come to understand that her initial failures are necessary steps toward eventual accomplishment, steps that make the final push to a mountain summit all the more rewarding.

Know the difference between quitting and failure.

It’s very easy for successful, professional athletes to look back on their failures and moments of challenge with fondness, but what if challenges prove insurmountable and it’s time to accept the fact that a career or even participating in a given sport is not meant to be? Michael Thompson, psychologist and author, points out that there comes a time when all of us must decide whether or not the struggle – of sports, of a relationship, or any other path we choose to take – is worth the pain. “In a broad sense, all learning and growth require struggle, but there is a difference between the experience of struggle that leads to success and the experience of struggle that only leads to more struggle.” Not every kid is destined to become a professional athlete, and as kids move up through the “failure factories” toward the more rarified air of high school and college sports, nearly all of them will have to decide when to throw in the towel. When this happens, parents are tasked with the duty to help out children find value in the experience of sports, whether that’s fun, fitness, or the lessons they have learned in courage, failure, resilience, sportsmanship, and teamwork.

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Jessica Lahey is the author of “The Gift of Failure: How The Best Parents Learn To Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed.” This chapter is excerpted from the book with her permission.