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All Of It with Alison Stewart
A New Book Confronts the Hidden Mental Health Crisis in Women's Sports
00:28:34
In a new book, two experts in mental health discuss the struggles women face in sports.
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Alison Stewart
Welcome back to ALL OF it. I'm Alison Stewart. Thank you for spending part of your day with us, folks. Happy Monday again. We've got great things coming up on ALL OF IT this week. Tomorrow we'll be talking about the hilarious new play oh Mary, which presents an entirely fictionalized and ridiculously funny farce of Mary, sorry, first lady Mary Todd Lincoln as a asp and cabaret star. You can't believe it. On Wednesday, NPR music critic Ann Powers will be with us to tell us about her new book called A Biographical look at the Life and Music of Joni Mitchell. That is all coming up later in the week. But let's get into today's Mental Health Monday conversation. The Paris Olympics are on the horizon and athletes mental health is part of the conversation. In recent years, we've seen Olympic gold medalist Simone Biles and tennis star Naomi Osaka take a step back to focus on themselves. In her memoir, Olympic champ swimmer Katie Ledecky emphasized that mental health is just as important as physical health A new book hopes to bring into the spotlight the issues that women face and ways to help. Issues like disordered eating, mistreatment by coaches, anxiety, abuse, and even suicide ideation. Written by two experts in both mental health and sports, the book provides needed advice for coaches and parents on how to help young athletes develop a healthy relationship with sports, create healthy coach athlete relationships, discuss puberty, address mental health crisis, and spot problems. It's titled the Price She Confronting the Hidden Mental Health Crisis in Women's Sports from the Schoolyard to the Stadium. Co author Katie Steele joins us today. She's a former D1 track athlete, a licensed marriage and family therapist, and co founder of the Thrive Men Health 5 mental health and outpatient mental health clinic in Oregon. Katie, welcome.
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Katie Steele
Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.
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Alison Stewart
And also joining us is co author Tiffany Brown. She's a senior faculty member at the University of Oregon in the Couples and Family Therapy graduate program and a licensed marriage and family therapist who works with student athletes and coaches. Tiffany, nice to meet you.
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State Farm Advertiser
Hi, nice to meet you. Thank you so much for having us listeners.
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Alison Stewart
We want to get you in on the conversation. Are you the athlete, parent of an athlete, or a coach? How did you deal with pressure of playing a competitive sport? What is the most helpful thing to make sure young girls and young women have a healthy relationship to sports? 2124-3396-9221-2433 wnyc or you can reach out on social media. Olive NYC or maybe you were a student athlete. What issues did you face? How did you cope with them? 2124-3396-9221-2433-WNYC Katie, the price she pays includes these firsthand accounts. There's research, there's reporting on women's spaces and both that they have to do. Excuse me. Both of you have your own personal experience as an athlete. Tell us about your athletic career.
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Katie Steele
Yeah, you know, I started in sport, just playing and being outside and being with my family. And then that kind of passion turned into opportunity later in high school. And I loved running. And as, as it progressed and I went to college, I ended up in a really unfortunate situation with coaches who kind of exploited that drive and really ended up being a catalyst for this project to generate change and kind of pull that curtain back while providing solutions for how we can better support female athletes.
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Alison Stewart
Tiffany, in the introduction you say that your relationship with sports wasn't molded in a traditional way. Where did your interest from sports come?
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State Farm Advertiser
I really got into sports As a way to build closeness and connection with my grandpa. I grew up with him being basically a parent to me. And I spent a lot of time literally sitting on his lap, having him point out in detail the rules of golf and football and boxing. And that's when I would get excited about players and what they were doing. And it was really a chance to build relationship for me at that time.
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Alison Stewart
Katie, in the book, you state it's important to allow children to try a variety of activities, if possible, to figure out what captures their passion and attention. So as parents, what should we look for in your child to show that they're truly interested in a sport and not just doing it for the approval of people around them? Which girls have a way of doing?
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Katie Steele
Absolutely. It's a million dollar question. Right. And I think one of the biggest things is really zooming out and does your kid have confidence in themselves to engage in other activities where they trust themselves to have maneuverability? We get so zeroed in on how do they do in this sport or that sport. But in reality, how do they do in relationship to themselves is oftentime the biggest indicator of if they're having fun. Are they willing to try new things and put themselves out there is really the biggest gauge because the competence is what gets squashed so early that we really want to work on preserving. So using that as the best baseline for if your kid is having fun or not.
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Alison Stewart
Well, how do you encourage a newfound interest or passion in the activity, Katie, without being overbearing?
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Katie Steele
Totally. Yeah. It's a fine line. Right. And one of the biggest things is letting yourself as a parent, and I want to give parent some credit, and I'll say as a parent, it's hard, right? And there isn't the exact right way. These are just things that we know are effective is allowing yourself to show up and be a huge fan of your kid when they're competing, but then allowing yourself the second the game or the match or the race ends, to step back and then become their parent and learn other things about them so that they know your love is so much deeper than how their performance was. And I think as parents, that's where some of it gets tricky, is that we get so zeroed in on the league and the team that they made and how many goals they scored and what their performance was instead of letting that be a part of it. And that's really fun when we're in it. But also, who else are these humans, right? We don't want them to equate their worth to Their outcome.
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Host or Interviewer
Tiffany, in the parenting and athlete chapter, you have this great section that's called Discovering youg Family Sports Values. Can you describe a little bit what somebody's sports value would be?
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State Farm Advertiser
Sure. I mean, really based on what Katie was just saying, the goal is to be able to develop kind of clarity around what do we care about, what are the things that are important to us. And knowing that, you know, without conversations like that, oftentimes the focus becomes winning or it becomes getting, you know, on the higher level team. And. And we would never say that those things are not valuable or important or worth celebrating. But to be able to develop clarity around your values as a family as it relates to sports, it might be, you know, focus on having fun or trying new things or celebrating when we step out of our comfort zone, you know, being able to broaden it so that the conversations that are happening around sports as a family are not zeroed in on either we won and then there's a lot of celebration or we lost and that sucks. And so the aim is to really help, you know, families develop new and different ways to be in conversation about sports. So it's not just, you know, brought down into that kind of dichotomous outcome of wins and losses.
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Alison Stewart
Yeah. You have this great chart here that says, make a list of 10 values that resonate with you, define what they mean to you and your family, and then over a course, a few weeks or a month, try to eliminate some of the values, the ones that don't seem to align with your daily life. Tiffany, what's an example of a value that you might think like, oh, maybe this isn't going to work out for us?
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State Farm Advertiser
Yeah, what a great question. You know, it might be a value around, and I think this is true for a lot of families and especially when it comes to sports, of we really value sitting and having conversation together at the end of the day. And some, you know, some families might do that around a meal time. And so trying that out as a family and realizing actually when we have multiple sports going on, when we have, you know, other extracurricular activities or parent gets home from work later, that's a really difficult for one for us to do. And so let's switch that and rather it be something that we're all trying to do at the end of the day, let's try to do that maybe in the morning. And so, you know, really having grace and, you know, brainstorming with the family around what could this look like for us? And Katie and I would say kind of the secret ingredient to that truly is at the level of process. If parents and adults and caregivers can turn to kids and be in a conversation about values and around what do we care about? That is such an important moment to get away from, you know, maybe even misinterpretation of what a parent or caregiver would say is important within the family when it comes to sports.
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Host or Interviewer
We're talking with licensed therapists Katie Steele and Tiffany Brown about their book the Price She Confronting the Hidden Mental Health Crisis and women's sports. From the Schoolyard to the Stadium. It's part of our Mental Health Mondays. We'd love to get you in on the conversation. Are you an athlete, Are the parent of an athlete, or you may be a coach? How do you deal with the pressure of playing competitive sport? What is most helpful to make sure young girls and young women have a healthy relationship with sports? Maybe you want to share your sports, your family's sports values. 2124-3396-9221-2433-WNYC. That is the number you can call or you can text to that number 212-433-9692 or you can reach out on social media@olivet WNYC. So, Katie, let coaches, coaches. Sometimes coaches have a harsh style. It can instill fear or shame in a young athlete. When do you know when it's actually time to step in and speak up?
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Katie Steele
Yeah, you know, it's interesting. We've had countless conversations about this, and I think one of the really clear ways for parents to monitor this is if it were and what we hear oftentimes, and I just to prime it a little bit for people is, yeah, but like, that's just sport. Like, it's intense and the coaches yell and there's high expectations and not everybody gets the same amount of playing time. And while all of those things are true, if you're bumping into one of those scenarios or a scenario like that, what we recommend is externalize. So run it through the filter of, okay, if that were happening and my kid went over to a kid's house to play after school, let's say, and a parent of the kid that they were at the home of treated my kid like that, would I let them go back? Or if this were happening in the classroom and their teacher was talking to them like that, would that be acceptable? Would that be okay? And where it gets tricky is that leagues and coaches, there is not a framework. There are not systems of accountability built in. Like, there are the education system. And so it does require parents to kind of keep a pulse on how is my kids seeming? Are they coming home bummed out? Are they beating themselves up? Are they not wanting to go to practice? Are they wanting to quit the sport altogether? And sometimes intervention is needed, though the goal is that our kids are the advocate and that they speak up for themselves and believe in themselves to facilitate those discussions. Sometimes, if the parent would intervene at any of these other examples, it's probably time to intervene, because it's not just sport that isn't just how sport should be. There can still be high expectations, sure, but also kindness and compassion.
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Alison Stewart
Let's talk to David, who is calling in from Queens. Hi, David, thank you so much for calling all of it.
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David (Caller)
Hi, thanks so much for taking my call. So we have a slightly different situation. My daughter is a competitive climber, and last year she really wanted to do it, but really struggled with competitions. You know, being very hard on herself would kind of fall apart during the comps. And really it was a real crutch. And everybody, of course, told us, you know, yeah, this is, you know, a growth opportunity. But, you know, us and her coaches were all trying to focus on her mental health, help her realize it's okay to not win every time. It's okay to not, you know, it's okay to just not completely do the best that you've ever done. And, you know, over the year, in the following year, this year was her second year, she did much better. She was able to manage her. Her mental health a lot better. So I guess. But we really struggled with was it okay to allow her to continue competing when we saw how hard it was on her herself. But at the same time, there was that value, that learning value to, you know, understanding that you can still enjoy something and not win every time and things like that.
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Alison Stewart
David, thank you so much for calling in. Did you want to respond to that, Tiffany?
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State Farm Advertiser
Yes, thanks for calling. And what a great, great question. And I think it represents what a lot of families are navigating. And my, you know, the first thing I thought of is just such care and, and, and love for, you know, his daughter and navigating all the things that she was really, you know, probably tender about. And I think about the situation of should we continue or should we not? And, you know, the question that David said at the end of was that the right thing? And I think what I want to respond to is to really suspend the expectation that there is a very clear right or a very clear wrong. Sometimes I think we have to show up to those conversations with young people. And, you know, it takes a conversation. It takes feeling our way through it. It takes maybe trying the way that we think makes sense and getting to the other side and evaluating it altogether. I hear that there was some goodness in it in terms of his daughter being able to try something and learn that she can be celebrated and cared about even if she's not winning and performing to this incredible degree. And that's such an important lesson to learn. And what a cool thing as a family to be able to be in that together. So it sounds that they did all the things right, slowed it down, talked to coaches, considered different outcomes. And I think on the other side of it, I would just encourage them to continue to be in conversation and really believe in that process that on the other side of things we can reevaluate and see if that was the right move or not and be okay with whatever that outcome is.
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Host or Interviewer
Another question here from a listener. Can they share language around how to help a child be their best without being competitively better than others? Katie, do you have a suggestion?
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Katie Steele
Yeah, it's a great question, right. Of we want kids to believe in themselves too, right. So what we oftentimes hear is this kind of dampening of belief of self, and we don't want to do that. So we want to continue to help kids believe in themselves. It doesn't mean they're better or worse. And I think to piggyback off of David's question, even of Tiffany's responses, is it isn't linear, right? So somebody can have an excellent season or an excellent game, but athletics isn't linear. There's going to be times when you don't perform well, and there's going to be times where you perform exceptionally. That doesn't mean that changes who or how you are as a human being. And I think making sure that parents are validating that of they are, the athlete is loved regardless. And it's fun to celebrate. It's fun to have great seasons. It's fun to perform your best, it's fun to improve. And there's so much to learn in down seasons. There's so much to learn about yourself. There's so much to tweak in terms of your inner dialogue and how you engage in sport. You want it to be fueled by passion. And I think for parents, I guess that's the hope I have for them, is that they can create conversations, positive or negative experience that's occurring for the kid, and help them craft what is it providing for the Athlete internally.
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Alison Stewart
You are listening to our Mental Health Monday conversation with the author of the Price She Confronting the Hidden Mental Health Crisis in Women's Sports, Katie Steele and Tiffany Brown. After the break, we'll talk about puberty in sports, the gender dynamic between coaches and young women, as well as the issue of depression. Stay with us. You're listening to all of it. I'm Alison Stewart. My guests are Katie Steele and Tiffany Brown. They've written the book the Price She Confronting the Hidden Mental Health Crisis in Women's Sports. From the Schoolyard to the Stadium. It's part of our Mental Health Mondays. Katie, I wanted to ask you about the gender dynamic. How does gender affect the dynamic between a coach and their team, especially if we're talking about an older male coach and young women?
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Katie Steele
Yeah, you know, it's a question we asked a lot in the gals that we were interviewing, especially around things like puberty and periods. And how did that shift the engagement of those conversations? And it was profound. They, you know, the athletes that we interviewed shared that they were, they felt more supported and understood by female coaches because they would ask coaches questions. And what we really want to punctuate in that is while that was some of the data point, that isn't something that is off limits for male coaches. There's a lot of male coaches out there and we don't only want female coaches, but we want all coaches to feel equipped to be able to address female needs, whether that's periods or the changes that happen during puberty. And so we hope through some education and insight that we learn from all these athletes that all coaches feel equipped to have those conversations. Because at the end of it, what it really boiled down to was are the conversations happening or not? And if they're happening, that was the difference maker.
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Alison Stewart
Tiffany, I'm going to ask you to read from the book. You had a gymnast named Ally and whose coaches did the right thing about.
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Host or Interviewer
How she was feeling.
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Alison Stewart
Would you mind reading that passage?
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State Farm Advertiser
Yes. So this is from page 57. The chapter is titled Creating Healthy Coach Athlete Relationships. Allie, a gymnast who went on to compete in college, remembers the big whiteboard the coaches put in the gym where she was just starting out as a child. It displayed an inspiring quote of the week and gave team members a space to share how they were feeling that day. The team was encouraged to participate in weekly check ins with their coaches and the rest of the group, which was a way to bond as a team. Every Saturday, practice started with learning a new dance together, a time she remembers as silly and fun before more serious training began. Allie could already put a lot of pressure on herself back then and her coaches worked hard to help her enjoy the sport. I liked competition because I took the sport seriously, Ali says. At one meet I remember my coaches on the sidelines making bird noises at me so that I would smile. They helped us keep perspective.
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Host or Interviewer
That's such great, it's such great response from the coach. It's such an important response from the coach.
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Alison Stewart
What is the relationship when you think.
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Host or Interviewer
About the coach to the athlete as opposed to teammates the athlete?
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State Farm Advertiser
Tiffany yeah, it's really about recognizing the role that coaches have that sometimes they don't see the impact of their role and see the power that they have, the influence that they have and how no matter how they see themselves, which we hear a lot of coaches say, oh, I'm super approachable. I like to talk to my athletes about how they're doing. That doesn't necessarily mean that that's what the athlete feels especially when playing time or decisions about who starts or even if we go higher up into, you know, college and beyond, decisions are made about scholarships and significant, you know, future decisions around who gets what in sport. And so, you know, the relationship with the coach is unique. It looks different across athletes on the team. And so we really want coaches to recognize that it's not just about best intentions, it's about what is actually experienced by the athletes and to recognize that you may have one athlete who feels like your sarcasm rolls right off their back. They don't really, you know, they're not impacted in any, you know, personalized way. And another athlete who those types of jokes and sarcasm might land on them really heavy. And so having ways to check in and to pause and to know that athletes are experiencing different things, that's the, that's the key to ensuring that that coach and athlete relationship can stay meaningful and healthy.
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Host or Interviewer
Katie A lot of the stories around body images of athlete are weight related and comments that can lead to becoming obsessed with the scale. What can a parent do to nip that in the bud or give those tool give their kid tools to help with comments so that they don't land.
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Katie Steele
Absolutely. And I think the biggest motivator and one of the hopes we had most with the price she pays was to illuminate the long term impact. So oftentimes this emphasis or focus on weight or what one is eating or body changes is for short term gain. Right. Of maybe my performance will enhance this season. But there's a story in the book of a gal who is a D1 swimmer, and they engaged in pizza and purge parties every Friday night in order to be able to maintain weight, show up in a swimming suit, work hard at practice. They had it all laid out. And what is so important about that story is that the gal is now 55 years old, has a hard time getting into a swimming pool, and still wrestles with disordered eating. And so it's critical. It is critical that we. We value girls where they are at, and that we do not shame the appearance of their body, the number on the scale, what they are putting into their body, but instead help them learn how to use their body in the way that their body is equipped to be able to engage in sport.
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Alison Stewart
Let's talk to Chris from Westchester. Hi, Chris. Thanks for calling all of it.
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Chris (Caller)
Yeah, hi. I'm a parent of two teenage athletes, boy and a girl, and my father was a professional baseball player, actually. And they're good athletes. But, you know, one thing that seems to be, I think, a trend that concerns me is this sort of monetization and almost professionalization of youth sports with all the travel teams and interscholastic competitions. And, you know, the upside is, I guess it raises the level of play and opportunity for, you know, gifted athletes. But I'm wondering if the downside is worth it, because I just see, you know, kids being put more pressure, whether it's either implicitly or directly by the whole process. You know, the fact of the matter is, I think the stats are only 4% of kids ever go on to compete at the collegiate level. And a lot of these organizations are, you know, convincing the parents that their kid has a shot if they sign up with this league or that league. And it's even infiltrated some of the high school sports teams where they're recruiting coaches from outside the district. They're not typically, in my day, they were teachers or volunteers or whatever it was. And, you know, I'm just wondering where this is going.
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Alison Stewart
Thank you so much for calling in. Tiffany, did you want to take that?
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Katie Steele
Yes.
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State Farm Advertiser
I love this question so, so much. And I think, because it's really nuanced, you know, what he was saying is, you know, it kind of ups the play it. You know, these athletes who have the skill set, they get to, you know, have some travel and go play against, you know, folks who are as skilled or maybe even more skilled. So there's all this incredible goodness that comes from settings like that. And the downside is exactly what he was saying. We don't necessarily know that every athlete that's going to be playing in a, in a league like that is going to make it to Division 1 or even Division 2. We know that stat is, is spot on. What we know is that kids who are doing any type of league like that are having to endure kind of this pay to play model where in order to continue and in order to believe that they're good enough to move on to high school sports that, or college sports that they have to follow all of these expectations. And it's just not true. So what we would say really is exactly what he's saying. There's so many questions on how is this impacting young kids. What is the outcomes that are going to happen? There's this incredible stat that we know that most athletes who make it to Division 1 play in college, they're playing for an NCAA Division 1 team, are oftentimes playing for a sport that wasn't their primary sport when they were younger. And so, you know, these pay to play models and the specialization oftentimes lead families to putting all of their eggs in one basket. And he's right. The pressure that comes with that, the expectations that come with that are daunting and not great for all kids. And we know that there are a lot of young people who make it to play in college because they had varied interests and they had lots of sports that they were playing. And so we would just really encourage parents and guardians to have these conversations with young people and to suspend sometimes this expectation that those types of, of teams and leagues are going to lead to something. And so if we see it as like Katie was saying earlier, this linear process, if I do this, this outcome is for sure going to happen, that's not guaranteed. And so if the belief can be, let's do this because it's fun, let's do it because it's going to, for a short period of time, you're going to play with different people. If we can make the expectations more manageable and those outcomes more manageable, then it sometimes doesn't set up for such major disappointments. Like he was asking about the book.
- [30:08]
Alison Stewart
Is the Price She Confronting the Hidden Mental Health Crisis in Women's Sports. From the Schoolyard to the Stadium, it's really great. It offers a lot of information. I've been speaking with Katie Steele and Tiffany Brown, its co authors. Thank you so much for joining us.
- [30:24]
Katie Steele
Thank you.
- [30:25]
State Farm Advertiser
Thank you so much.
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