Reflect on Personal Motivation (A Guide to Parental Projection)

How do we maintain ambition while cultivating calm? When to push, and when to sit back?

Overall, the general consensus among sports psychologists seems to be that in order to generate positive outcomes in youth sports, we should:

1. encourage autonomy

2. focus on enjoyment

3. reflect on personal motivations, and

4. encourage open communication.

I want to talk about number 3.

Becoming more aware of how my own athletic background shows up in my parenting has helped me.

Overshare: I grew up doing competitive horseback riding (show-jumping). When I eventually landed at a boys’ school in Toronto, team sports were the dominant way athletic prowess was measured (mainly hockey—it was Canada!). My success as an equestrian struck my classmates and teachers as odd. I was a decent defensive player across a few sports and eventually found some success in swimming during my junior year. But it wasn’t until graduate school that I really dug into a team sport: ultimate. I got decent at it, loved it, and spent just about every free minute playing for six years—at both the collegiate and club levels. Whenever I had a spare moment, I grabbed a disk and a friend and headed outside to throw. After ultimate, I stayed active with distance running.

Back in middle school, I could have approached things differently. I could have focused, trained, and built up my puck or ball skills. Instead, I often felt bitter. More experienced kids delivered their feedback bluntly: you suck. The coaching didn’t help. Rather than developing talent where they found it, many coaches piled-on with negative messaging. I take responsibility for my own work ethic, but the fact remains that I left high school with the sense that individual sports were the only place I could succeed. It was a lousy feeling.

I carry that feeling into my parenting today despite my successes with ultimate—projecting my wish to have been good at team sports in Middle and High schools onto my kids’ performance today. That gets in the way.

By projection, I mean the tendency to unconsciously transfer unfulfilled ambitions onto someone else. 

It turns out this is a well-documented phenomenon in the domain of youth sports. A 2013 study by Brummelman et al. is titled with uncanny precision: “My Child Redeems My Broken Dreams: On Parents Transferring Their Unfulfilled Ambitions onto Their Child.” Another study, by Dorsch et al. (2009), underscores the bi-directional nature of youth sports: parents shape their kids’ experiences, but those experiences also reshape the parents.

There’s a lot more research in this domain, but I’ll end with one final study and a suggestion for further reading. Lisinskiene & Lochbaum (2019) show that when we focus not only on the athlete, but also on the athlete–parent relationship, outcomes improve. Strong attachment can support growth—but unhealthy forms of attachment can also create pressure, reduce enjoyment, and damage long-term participation. 

In short: reflect on your personal motivations!

One of the best resources I’ve come across for thinking through all this is Dan Blank’s Happy Feet: How to Be a Gold Star Soccer Parent (Soccer Poet LLC, 2014). If you know me, you’ve probably heard me recommend it.

Blank starts with a sobering statistic: 75% of young people quit team sports by the age of 13. And a prominent reason they cite? Their parents’ behavior makes sports unpleasant.

We can all do better by doing a little quiet self-reflection before we open our mouths on the car ride home.