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Youth Inc. with Greg Olsen
Why Youth Sports Trigger Parents (A Sports Psychologist's Perspective)
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- [00:00]
Jonathan Caron
Hey, sports parents. Welcome to Youth Inc. I am not Greg Olson. Greg is out this week and the Youth Inc. Team made the old Bell south car. The bullpen called in the big old lefty from up the road. So here I am. If we haven't met, my name is Jonathan Caron. I'm the creator of a platform called Healthy Sports Parents. As a quick plug for us, season three of the Healthy Sports Parents podcast is going on right now. We release episodes every Wednesday. We just had on USA softball legend and current San Diego State head coach Stacy Newman. Denise. This week we have a recruiting roundtable with three sitting division head coaches from volleyball, softball and men's soccer. Next week, we're talking with Dr. Christopher Nowinski. He's a former Harvard football player and WWE star and now the co founder of the Concussion and CTE Foundation. Conversations all about head injuries and protecting our kids as they play these games growing up. You can find our show wherever you get podcasts on YouTube or any social media platform at Healthy Sports Parents. My guest today, though, is coming off a trip to the Super Bowl. We're recording this a week before the game. So congrats if you won, doc. Sorry if you lost. Like, I don't know yet. But Dr. Jonathan Jenkins, he is our guest today and he's a team psychologist for the New England Patriots. He. He's also a member of the Harvard Medical School teaching community and a team psychologist for the Boston Red Sox. He also has a brand new book out called Mentality Wins that is incredible that your athlete needs to read and you need to read with them. That's available on Amazon. So go get that after you listen to this. Dr. Jenkins, though, thanks for joining us. We appreciate it.
- [01:45]
Dr. Jonathan Jenkins
Thank you for having me. I'm excited to get talking.
- [01:47]
Jonathan Caron
I want to start the same place I start on our show each week. We begin the episode asking the same question. Since we're talking about parenting in sports today, let's talk about you as a parent first. Can you tell us about your kids, what they play and what it's like being dad to them?
- [02:02]
Dr. Jonathan Jenkins
Being dad is the funnest thing I've ever done in my life. So I'm a child psychologist. So I worked with kids my entire life. I would align with the kids and be like, your parents are doing wrong and trying to figure out how to advocate for them. And then I became a parent and I was like, oh my gosh, it's so hard, so difficult, so many challenges and just the emotional. I wouldn't want to say strain, but just Intensity of feelings that you feel when you're a parent, it's unreal and you can't necessarily describe it. Our son is seven and a half. Make sure that I always put the half in there because he's earned it. And early in his life he had a lot of medical concerns. So over the course of his seven and a half years, he's probably have had close to seven surgeries. So the ability to really have a lot of gratitude in those moments and also to think about the village that it takes to not only raise a child who's healthy and active and enthusiastic, but also to raise two parents. My wife and I, to make sure that we're doing the best for our son, has been instrumental when it comes to sports. Not really a team sport. Guy loves to run around, loves to explore with his feet, with his hands, climb, swim, do a lot of active things, but hasn't really gotten into organized sports, which has not been my experience. I did them a lot as a kid, so there's been a little bit of a transition for my wife and I. But our most important thing and the thing that we enjoy the most is just watching him enthusiastically take on challenges in his physical world and in space climb things. And we've gotten a lot of enjoyment out of that.
- [03:31]
Jonathan Caron
I'm in the Southeast, I'm in North Carolina and we're recording this the week that we. After we got the big ice storm that came through. My kids have been home all week and I work from home. And so you talk about parenting being hard and this has been one of those weeks. It's been fun because I've gotten to go outside and go sledding in the middle of the day, which was awesome. But it's also been the hey daddy. Hey daddy. Hey daddy. Hey daddy. Because these kids who are used to running around doing stuff all day, they've been stuck at home and it's been a whole different world of hard parenting and fun parenting and all the different things that come with it. I think all of us here can be mature enough to say, to acknowledge that there are good things, there are hard things, and it's all within the same five minute realm of a normal day.
- [04:13]
Dr. Jonathan Jenkins
Totally. And when I, when I think about my responsibility as a parent and I feel like my partner feels this way too, we have an understanding that we're trying to do quality over quantity. So we don't know how many days we're going to have with our son and particularly with the medical concerns. Early on we had to really approach the fact that we're mortal beings, both him and us, pretty quickly. And so as we get up in age, we can't necessarily bargain and say we're going to have 100 years with our son or we're going to have another 30 or 40. And so we're really trying to do is just make every day count. How can we use the time that we have and put as many moments in the moments as possible since we are not in control of how long we're going to be here, all three of us together. And that's actually kind of taken some of the weight and some of the pressure off because it makes me invest in the day that I have in the moment that I have and try to help me course correct as quickly as possible. Because if today is my last day, I want to course correct now as opposed to saying, this is something I'm going to get to in a week or two.
- [05:15]
Jonathan Caron
And so today's conversation is all about how we do those course corrections in the moment while we are watching our kids play. Because the dirty secret in youth sports is that when we signed our kid up for T ball for the first time or soccer for the first time, no. No one gave us a brochure that said, hey, Dr. Jenkins, this is going to bring up every insecurity you have ever had for your entire life while you watch these 8 year olds play soccer pretty terribly on a Saturday morning. No one warns us that that's going to happen, but it does. And that's just part of going through the youth sports journey. And I believe it's the hardest part of the youth sports journey. It's not the pressure from clubs, it's not the push to specialize, but it's that internal feeling of our deepest insecurities coming to the surface. And it's like, why am I feeling this way with these nine year olds playing basketball? It's the ymca. This shouldn't matter. But to us, in that moment, all of it matters. And it feels like the heaviest thing in the world. So as a trained psychologist, like, why am I feeling all of these feelings and what's going on inside of me that's causing it? Like, what can you teach us in this moment?
- [06:32]
Dr. Jonathan Jenkins
Well, I'd say the thing that causing it is this term that you may not have heard of, but it's called love. Right?
- [06:38]
Jonathan Caron
Okay. Okay.
- [06:41]
Dr. Jonathan Jenkins
You have tremendous love for your kid. That's what happens. And so you have that feeling of watching them just attack a problem and it just wells you up with emotions, but also Seeing them devastated and seeing them encounter challenges that either you've encountered in your own life or you know your kid and you know the face that they're making, and you can imagine how they feel inside. But when we pick sports for our kids, we often pick it because it's like, well, I as a father, had a great experience playing basketball, football, lacrosse. So I want to share that with my child. And it's interesting to think about parents who pick complete opposite sports that they played as youth or in college or in high school, and how that relationship with sports and the feelings might feel different. Because if my son becomes an equestrian and I've never really rode horses in that way before, now he becomes the expert in the house on the sport.
- [07:35]
Jonathan Caron
And my daughter rides horses. I've never been on a horse. And so the things she says when she comes home from a lesson, it's like I said something about a horse jogging, and she immediately corrected me and said, no, it's something. And I'm like, oh, my bad. Sorry, I didn't know the word.
- [07:51]
Dr. Jonathan Jenkins
But it's cool, because now she's in a position of power in the household. And you think of kids, we're always telling them where to go, what to do, what to eat, when to go to bed, when to wake up. They don't have a lot of power, but by giving them a sport or an activity that you know nothing about or very little or you're not accomplished in, it gives them the opportunity to be the expert in the house. It might puff their chest up a little bit when they talk about it. And you can then take a position of just enjoying the process of learning that your kid is going through. But sometimes when we pick a similar sport, that big L word, the other L word legacy, comes into play, where we then make assumptions about what's gonna happen to them based on what happened to us. And generations are different. We didn't have social media. We were trying to be the fastest kid in the neighborhood of the town, not in the state or the entire country. All these other expectations didn't exist. So really being able to meet your kid where they're at and understand the society that they're trying to play the sport in.
- [08:44]
Jonathan Caron
The other piece of it that I have found, at least for me and the parents that I've talked to is in some of these, mom, you talk about seeing your kid's face in a moment, and you know what they're feeling. I felt those things from my childhood welling up inside me when I see that for example, both my kids play soccer. For those of you who don't know, me. And my youngest stepped up for a penalty kick one time, and I remembered blowing it in the moment when my team was counting on me. And so I wanted him to score, but I also didn't want him to feel that thing that I'm now feeling, because my body is remembering and my mind is remembering what I felt like as a child. So it's like this tension inside of me, like I want good things for him, but I'm feeling something too, and I can't do anything about it because I'm detached on the sideline. And so I feel helpless. This kid that I love more than anything is on the field, and there's a chance it could go wrong. I'm having to process all these emotions at 9:30 on a Saturday morning when it's 37 degrees outside and I didn't sleep well the night before. It's just like it's a combination of all these things happening at the same time, that if we don't know any better, it gets really easy to do some things that aren't the healthiest on the sidelines.
- [10:06]
Dr. Jonathan Jenkins
Yeah, I think you make a great point. This idea of we want the best for our kids or we want our kid to score that penalty shot, but we also don't want them to feel the pressure that we want them to score the penalty shot. We don't care about the game. In actuality, we care about them feeling the success of I practiced this. I had the opportunity to do it in a game, and I was successful. So then being able to learn that practice creates talent and talent creates success. And so when we think about it in that way, it's easy to communicate that to our kid. But also the idea that sometimes we accidentally say stuff that can be really meaningful or body language again. So you think about that, pk and let's say your child accidentally misses it or mishits it, and then they turn to look at you because you're the anchor, you're the buoy, you are the life vest. And you make a reaction. And the reaction could be for a variety of things. Sadness for them.
- [11:00]
Jonathan Caron
And the reaction's human.
- [11:02]
Dr. Jonathan Jenkins
And the human instantaneous. Right. A micro emotion that just happens. And they may misinterpret it as not only not disappointment because they missed the shot and you feel bad for them, but that they are unlovable because they weren't able to master that task or that activity or they let the team down. Not only did I leave the team down. I let my parent down, and that would be devastating. So it's really hard to do that. I know some parents, like my mom, she would have to take a walk around and away from the lacrosse field just because she was so animated, but really trying to figure out, okay, what is my purpose watching this practice? What is my purpose at this game? My purpose is to support, to encourage, to be a resource, but not to be a source of stress and frustration.
- [11:49]
Jonathan Caron
One of the hardest parts is that every kid's different. My daughter wants different support than my son does. And it's like going from one game to the other and having to switch. Like, this kid needs this, this kid wants. And so we're doing that because we want to support them in the way that they actually feel supported. And so if we're just going in with what the way we want to support my daughter, she's the sarcastic one. Like, she is so much like me. So if I'm on the sideline and she does something terrible and she looks over, I can like, well, that was. That sucked. That was terrible. Just. Just like that. And she'll be like, yep. And then she moves on. And that. That's her way of just acknowledging it and moving on. My son is the emotional one. If I were to say that to him in the middle of the game, it would have a totally negative reaction to him. So if I'm reacting in the way that my natural way to react, which is that sarcastic way that I relate to my daughter with when my son's playing, then what I am trying to support him, actually goes in and starts tearing him down a little bit, which is the last thing I want to do.
- [12:53]
Dr. Jonathan Jenkins
Yeah. And not only are kids different, but every kid changes and evolves. Right? Like, my son at six is different than he was at seven and seven and a half. Even. You go six months, there's a huge change in terms of tolerance and personality and emotionality and all these other things. And so we don't want to come from a place of being and feeling like we're the expert of our kids. We want to be curious. We want to be explorers. Right. We want to be Lewis and Clark in Sacwia, you know, exploring the west and trying to figure things out. We don't want to feel like we know it all. And that's, I think, part of just love in general. You never want to be with somebody where you feel like you know them completely part of that relationship, whether it's romantic or, you know, being a father or Whatever being a parent is that you get to uncover and unravel all these different things about your kids. And as you unravel it, it helps make the relationship closer and you get to tell things about yourself to your kids and your kids get to share in that process too. And so I think as we get more comfortable with a little bit more mutuality in the relationship, we can really find ways that we can support each other, particularly while our kids are younger.
- [14:03]
Jonathan Caron
What I have learned is that I think so much of what we feel on the sidelines and throughout this journey, when we're deciding what to do and what team to be on and all of these things, I think they stem a lot of it from two natural desires that live within all of us. One's called self love and one is called self glory. Self love is basically the natural desire for others to like us. We want other people to look at us and say, hey, Dr. Jenkins, good. Like, I like being around him, Jonathan, I like being around him too. Self glory is the natural desire for others to think we're good at what we're doing. We want to roll up to the lacrosse stadium and they look, hey, Dr. Jenkins, he's raising an athlete the right way. That kid is a great teammate, great athlete. We want people to think those things about us. That's a normal natural desire. That goes back to the cavemen. We wanted people, we wanted the people around us to like us. So when the barbarians came into the cul de sac, the people around us are going to protect us, right? That's a normal, natural thing. So all of us have that desire within us and neither of them are bad. But when our self worth and our fulfillment is dependent on how well our children perform in a game, that's when things have a tendency to go off the rail. When we're trying to get love from other parents based on the way our kid plays, or we think other parents will think we are doing a better job. If we're going to all the camps and all the clinics and all the things and on the right team, that's when the pressure starts to rise a little bit. So that's my theory. Just some training. When you hear that, as a psychologist, what do you think?
- [15:48]
Dr. Jonathan Jenkins
I think that's pretty spot on. When you were talking, it made me think of a. And it might be the wrong term for it, so I apologize if I'm wrong. Like a bike reflector. You know those red and white things. Car light hits it, it shines bright. So you have that and you have a candle, right? And so if you were trying to get warm, both of them admit light. But if you're out in the snow like both of us are, and you tried to get warm by a bike reflector, it's not really going to provide you any warmth. But that candle will, that fire will. And so I think of self love as that fire. People see it, but it provides some type of nourishment to you and maybe even nourishment to the people around you. Like people can gather around you, like Jonathan, I like being around you too. Like let's hang out, I feel good after I leave you and all these other things. But that self glory, it lights up, but it's has no heat to it, it has no warmth to it, it has no nourishment to it. So although you may look lit, you know, to use oh geez slang for the Gen Zs, there's nothing sustainable about it. It doesn't nourish you in the way that these other things. Well, it might protect you because it's reflective. People see you and they can move around you or move towards you. But just telling about that warmth, right? Self love always makes me think of that internal nourishment and that warmth. And I think that's the way that I see the two different terms.
- [17:08]
Reagan
Hey, what's going on? This is Reagan, one of the producers for you Things. Before we get back to the episode, we have some exciting news to share. Our weekly newsletter feeds you inspiring, informative and entertaining stories to help you navigate youth sports better. And right now, you have the chance to win one custom piece of merch with your school or club's logo on it. Just like this. Head over youth.inc Newsletter Enter your email address and sign up for our weekly content newsletter. Trust me, you're going to want to read it. Each week, we're selecting one such subscriber to win a custom piece of merch. You could be next. Plus, we're sending out a bonus newsletter this week for National Girls and Women in Sports Day. Find out everything you need to know and sign up today@youth.in newsletter.
- [17:48]
Jonathan Caron
All right, so we've spent the first half of this episode talking about what's going on inside of us so that we could understand it at a base level. I want to spend the back half of the episode talking about how these things impact what we do on this journey with our kids. So I want to hit on three pieces of the youth sports journey that we've all heard about, but probably haven't heard it from your perspective and probably haven't heard about it from how it impacts us as parents. And the first one we're going to talk about is practice. We're going to talk about practice, not a game practice. Greg had on Abby Wambach and Julie Foudy a few months ago and Abby gave her parents should not I gotta do it right parents should not attend practice speech that she has given a thousand times. And I love her as a soccer player. She has great opinions, but I kind of disagree with her a little bit there. And I have a slightly more nuanced view than she does about parents attending practice. But from the sports psychologist perspective, from the child psychologist perspective, what should parents do during practice? Should they stay? Should they leave? Is it age dependent? Like what? How should we be thinking about this?
- [19:05]
Dr. Jonathan Jenkins
It's a great question. I think it has to be developmentally appropriate, right? And developmentally could be the maturity of your child, but it also could be like their level of comfort in the sport. Some sports are more dangerous than others. Some sports are more complicated. You got to think they're going to see you as an anchor in that space. So you don't necessarily need to be like toes on the sidelines so close that you almost feel like you're, you know, the next person on the field. But being present could be being in the car, you know, handling work, taking a phone call, talking to some family friends. It could be being in the area. So it's a complex and there might be, you know, someplace where you can get food so that your child knows that you're close by. But we want to be able to create opportunities for kids to be able to problem solve on their own, socially, emotionally, be able to figure them out without that parental oversight. But we also want to make sure that our kids don't feel isolated where if there was some big issue, maybe the environment around the field isn't safe. So maybe having a parent around makes you feel more comfortable to be able to play free. So again, it depends. You know, I put a lot of the onus in parents knowing their kids and being able to constantly update that data so that they know what's best for them. But you don't want to hijack opportunities for your kids to problem solve and learn by always being present. And even though it may be fun to watch your kid play, doing it in a way where they feel like this is their moment, this time is their time to shine. This is their time to act wild and be themselves and not have to be not only certain person at school and a certain person at home and a certain person at practice. They can be whomever they want to be as they're learning the skill I had.
- [20:52]
Jonathan Caron
I knew intellectually that the fourth to sixth grade window is when kids start wanting a certain level of independence. But it hit me a little weird when my daughter in fourth grade asked us to start dropping her off and leaving soccer practice. And like, I let her do it because I trusted the coaches. It was a safe environment, like all of that. And she told me she wanted that spot, that space with her friends. But like it came so much quicker than I thought it was going to and younger than I thought it was going to. And I, I won't get into the whole story here, but some stuff happened that season that wasn't great. Like it wasn't abuse or anything, but it wasn't a great situation to the point that she then asked us to start showing up again. And so even within the course of one season, one kid changed from wanting one thing to wanting another. And I think it's just the important piece of do you have open lines of communication with your kids so that they feel comfortable telling you what they want? Because I know a lot of. I don't want to make assumptions. I see a lot of families where I don't think the kid would feel comfortable asking mom and dad to do something other than what mom and dad want to do. And this isn't about like putting your kids wants and desires at a level it shouldn't be. To me, what it is is it's a way to allow kids to turn into grownups in safe ways because they're going to turn into those grownups regardless. But can we give them the spaces to start figuring things out on their own? I had on Scott Jackson, who is an assistant baseball coach at unc and he said that he never went to his kids practices because it was their time to figure out if they wanted to work hard or not. Because he didn't want to tell them they had to work hard. He wanted them to learn that if you use this time to goof off, okay. But when you don't play on Saturday, don't come whining to me. But they, he wanted them to learn that in a way that wasn't dad teaching them, but they're learning it. So it's an internal motivator, not an external one coming from a parent.
- [23:05]
Dr. Jonathan Jenkins
And I totally agree with that. I think what you're doing in those moments and what you did with your daughter is that you're building this consultative relationship, you know, from kids are young, you have to protect their physical safety. Like, you literally have to do that damn near every day, right? There's some type of accident or injury that could potentially happen because they're discovering the world. As your kid gets older and they go into adulthood, you're going from protector to consultant. They're asking you for advice. They're communicating you their challenges, their strengths, their dreams, their aspirations. And you're just supposed to drop gems, drop knowledge, not necessarily tell them what to do unless they ask you, but you're consulting with them. And when you're allowing your kid to do that at an early age, it's not going to be harder for them to transition into that in later age. And they'll know that, hey, whatever's going on in my life, I can always talk to my parent or my parents about it. Whether it's a small thing like please don't come to practice or please come back to practice, or it's a big thing like XYZ in life. I know that those lines of communication are always available. And you're also doing Abelyn at mgh talks a lot about it. Like this collaborative problem solving, getting kids involved in problem solving and planning with the parents and with the family so that kids feel like they have skin in the game. They have ownership over what happens. And so even with our seven and a half year old, if we're gonna take vacations, we'll ask him like, hey, where do you want to go? What do you want to do on this vacation? Where do you want to eat? So that he feels like he's a part of the decision making process and is not being kind of like dragged or escorted around wherever we go. When he makes a bad suggestion, we tell him, like, these are the reasons why we can't do it. But recently we went to Yellowstone. He's like, I want to go ice climbing. And we did it. It was a lot of fun. So, like, you never know what can happen if you allow your kids to participate. But the thing that will happen is that they're going to communicate with you more because you're encouraging them to speak. And there will come a time in every parent's life, usually teenage years, usually around puberty, where they won't want to talk to you or the communication will change. But if you start practicing that communication now, you will have established so much goodwill in that bank that even though it will naturally dip, it may not dip as much as you're seeing a dip in Other households or with other kids.
- [25:23]
Jonathan Caron
I think I need to admit, the part that we don't want to admit here is that I really like watching my kids play, and I really enjoy watching them practice, and I really enjoy watching them figure it out. And doing this comes at a cost to what I enjoy. And that's so freaking hard like that. That is the tragedy of parenting. Like, we enjoy these kids in the moment, but for us to raise them to where they need to go, we've got to sacrifice things that we want for the betterment of them. And so if you're listening to this and you're like, doc, I get it. Like, I'm tracking with everything you say, but I've only got so many years watching them play. And statistically, we know most of these kids are going to be done by middle school. It's like, I got a sophomore in high school. Like, I've only got two years left because they're not playing in college. Like, I want to see everything I can. So I just want to. I want to acknowledge that what we are saying, while it is true, it's also really freaking hard.
- [26:27]
Dr. Jonathan Jenkins
Right? Right. And. And it's a sacrifice in certain situations and. Or it could be an investment, delayed gratification. My child is getting so comfortable with this sport that it's actually going to prolong their involvement in the sport. So I may miss games now, but I'm going to catch them on the tail end. Or now instead of, you know, whether it's, let's say it's golf. Right. I'm not going to golf practice, but now I can go play golf with my kid. I'm not going to soccer practice, but we can still have neighborhood soccer matches or street hockey or something like that. So I get connection with the sport, but I also maybe give them opportunities to do it or, you know, we have a lot of kids that are doing club sports and their high school or junior high sports. It's like, yeah, when they're. When you're playing at, you know, Natick Middle School, I'm going to come watch those games. But when you're practices. But when you're practicing for your club team, I'm not going to watch those. So figuring out how to negotiate and also, you know, talking to your partner about that, talking to your friends about that, like how difficult it is so that you have an outlet to really express those emotions. Because if you're feeling it, get it out, talk about it, and figure out if there's any solutions that might help.
- [27:40]
Jonathan Caron
I could stay Here forever. But we're running out of time so we got to blow through these next two a little bit quicker. So let's go ahead and move on. Got the, the pitch clocks running on us. Second thing I want to talk about is the comparison trap. One of the most human things in the world when we sit down at practice or at a game is to look around at all the kids playing and notice who's good, who's not so good, and who's picking daisies out in the outfield. Like there's absolutely no judgment in that. We've all done it. When we walk up to a field, that's what we do. But like most things, the toxicity is in the dose. When we start looking around and comparing what other parents are doing with what we're doing and start making, making judgments or feeling pressure based on other people, we move from that healthy sports parent place to a place that's not really good for anyone. So how can we manage our own comparisons and expectations so that it doesn't accidentally begin adding pressure to our kid and making this more about our insecurities than our kids goals and desires?
- [28:45]
Dr. Jonathan Jenkins
Yes, great question. I mean, I think initially what comes to mind is comparison is not going to help your kid. It's not going to help your kid. Your kid is an N of one, you know, and regardless of what's going on in particularly around the sports arena, obviously there are other areas where comparison could be helpful. You know, growth charts and all these other things. But in sports, your toughest opponent is yourself. And every day at soccer practice your daughter was trying to get better than her previous self. And so it really doesn't matter what Tom, Dick or Harry is doing or are doing. I don't know which verb to use in that situation. But the idea that you are trying to develop your child into an athlete, these early stages of sports is all about player development and character enrichment. When they're in high school and when they're in college, that's really about winning and loss and losses and that being more of a priority. But like there's so many variables and oh yeah, remember that kid who is really good at baseball at age 10, maybe by 14 they're not playing anymore, or maybe by 12 they're just not as good because maybe your kid was a late bloomer. Maybe they hit puberty early or late.
- [29:54]
Jonathan Caron
I've been this tall since 13, Doc. Yes, I didn't keep stopped growing. I was the kid towering over everyone in basketball in fourth, fifth, sixth grade and then eighth grade. I Never stopped growing. And so no one taught me how to shoot because I was the tall kid that could shoot, that could rebound. So when I got to ninth grade and everybody helped hit their growth spurt, you can't have a six foot center in the middle of a basketball court because that kid's not going to do anything.
- [30:19]
Dr. Jonathan Jenkins
Right, right, right. No flying in the house of Mutombo at six feet. It's not gonna work. Not gonna work.
- [30:25]
Jonathan Caron
But like, there does feel like it feels like there's a pressure on us when we start looking around. And it's like my kid's gonna be left behind if I don't do the same thing as Timmy, Tommy and Joey down the street. And when they're putting their kid in all the lessons and the clinics and the camps and like, I don't want my kid to fall behind. So how do I deal with that internally? Because that's a real thing. Let's just talk about specialization. Greg had one of the best specialization takes that I have ever heard. He says that we all know multiple sports as kids is the best thing for them athletically. We know that we shouldn't be specializing at young ages because that's not great. But when we know the competition for the middle school team and we know the competition for the high school team and all the kids competing for that, those limited number of spots are specializing, we feel that comparison pressure to go do it, even though we know it's not best for our kid long term. So, like, how can you help us reframe that comparison when we start feeling it?
- [31:33]
Dr. Jonathan Jenkins
Yeah, it does sometimes feel like an arms race. But I think we need to start with a grounding fact. Like, if your kid does not make varsity baseball, they will still be okay. Like, it's not, it's not Mortal Kombat, that if they make it, something awful happens or if they don't make it, something awful happens. It's a situation where we've now hyped up these badges of honor, these labels, these teams getting admitted to, these teams accepting the scholarship, getting listed on varsity as these make or break things. In reality, they're not that important. And there are some parents, and it's not a judgment thing. There are some parents who've gone through some really significant challenges with their kids like us, where we see some of that stuff with sports parents getting overly and exaggeratedly excited, animated, angry about these things. And we're like, well, three years ago we were concerned about the livelihood of our kid. And you're worried about whether they made JV or varsity. And so putting things in perspective can be challenging when there's not a lot of gratitude that's experienced and shared and communicated within the family. And again, you want the best for your kids. We've talked a lot about this in the podcast and how things can be appropriately altered and shifted into a way that can grow into an unhealthy space. But again, we really need to remind ourselves that your kids can be devastated. They cannot make something. They can lose, and we can pick them back up and they can rally. Rocky's a great movie because of all the series. He gets knocked down in the first part of the movie, and then he gets back up. So if we've taught our kids resilience, they'll be able to do it. When I did some boxing, I had three boxing fights. Two and one. The first thing that our coach taught us, we spent like three, three or four months on just defense. Just defense. So not even how to throw apart. Not the attractive part that we all think about boxing, throwing that punch, knocking somebody out. He's like, I want to protect you. My job is to protect you. If you're going in that ring, you can throw a punch. You kind of know how to do that, but you probably don't know how to protect yourself from a punch. It's the same thing with our kids. When they succeed, they're prepared to do that. They innately have the ability to figure it out and problem solve. We need to prepare them for when they fall or when things are complicated or when things are unsure. And if we make these big travel teams, AAU teams, tournaments, scholarships, Nils, so big, now we're putting importance on things that in the grand scheme of things, if I had to pick things for my son to fail at, failing to make varsity is a lot better than failing to be a good boyfriend when he gets older or failing to be a good worker in a business that's relying upon him or being a bad kid. Like all these different things, I would much rather failure to happen in sports then failure to happen in other areas of his life that would cause significant, lasting emotional challenges.
- [34:25]
Jonathan Caron
Yeah.
- [34:26]
Dr. Jonathan Jenkins
Yeah.
- [34:26]
Jonathan Caron
Yes. No notes. Yep. You put a bow on it. Let's move on. The piece of this that makes what you just said so hard is the last one we're going to talk about today, and that's identity. There's a lot of talk of from platforms like mine, you think talks about it. Everyone talks about how we have to make sure we're not letting our kids identity be found in their Sport. They are a human outside their sport. Their sport is just something they play. I agree with that a thousand percent. I've talked about it every place I could. But if we're not careful, we start to find our identity in the sport our kid plays. We start calling ourselves a baseball mom or a hockey dad or a, or whatever the sport is that becomes our identity. And when our identity is in our kids sport, their performance impacts what we feel about ourselves at a human level. So when they don't make JV and we are a basketball dad, that's where these things start going off the rails inside of us. So how can we stay grounded? You just use that word a minute ago. But how can we say grounded as parents and who we are so that we don't fall into that trap of letting our own egos get tied to our kids performance?
- [35:45]
Dr. Jonathan Jenkins
Yeah, I mean to use, I already use Gen Z slang once, I'm going to use another one. Parents need to touch grass, right? They need to get outside, they need to get outside their head, they need to get active. And again, I understand very, very well how limited time or how much limited time parents have. And I only, we only have one child. So I can't imagine people who have gangs of children in their house going from this way to that way, practices, schools, recitals and all these other things, but really enriching your own life, being able to be a parent who cares deeply about their kids and then also has other things that are deeply important to them. Sometimes when we see people over identify into that hockey mom, hockey dad, lax mom, lax dad Persona, it often can mean that they're unfulfilled in other areas of their lives. And so they're overloading this one thing that is kind of boom or bust in terms of joy or sadness because other parts of their lives aren't enriched. So if you find yourself over identifying with that label, that hashtag, that category, really trying to say, okay, what other areas of my life are bringing me joy or could bring me joy and how do I access them and how can I take on things for myself? So the amount of time I'm spending per week dedicated to being a hockey dad, how much time can I take back and reclaim to do things that I need to do to enrich myself, to kind of turn the light inward and fulfill myself and be able to get some of my needs met?
- [37:14]
Jonathan Caron
Yeah, as parents, especially as sports parents with the restraints on our time and the pressures on our time, because we're going from this practice to that practice to gain all this stuff. We spend a lot of time putting others before ourselves, putting our kids before us. And in the process of doing that, we often lose our own hobbies. Like we, the things that we enjoy doing are replaced by going to practice or going to a game or driving from this thing to that thing. And so especially for dads, I know this happens with moms too, but especially for dads, these sports connect us back to our hobbies as a kid and we get to be around a game we love. Even if it's not like even if you grew up playing baseball and now your kid plays lacrosse, you still get to be around competition. And so that, that awakens something in us. And the other piece of this is like that we got to be honest, we hear about this loneliness epidemic for adults in America and being around these teams give us other like minded people to be around. So it fulfills a piece of us that is a whole that's missing because we don't really have a ton of relationships in our society. So of course we love helping our kids experience all these good things. But it also lets us reconnect with parts of our past that we've kind of lost touch with. So I think like again what I want parents to hear from this as we talk about all of these things are normal, natural, human things that happen to all of us. We have to fight for the health. Like it's going to be unhealthy if we are not intentionally being healthy. So just like, I mean I, you, most of you guys don't know me. I've lost £75 over the last two years. If I wasn't intentionally going about doing things, I'm going to gain all of that back if I just do what I naturally want to do. And so I'm having to fight for that health on the weight loss side. Just like as parents we have to fight for the healthy side and we have to fight to keep our identity out of our kids sports because it's naturally going to go there with the amount of time that we spend around these games and practices.
- [39:35]
Dr. Jonathan Jenkins
Yeah, no, I totally agree and if it's okay for me to speak on it, what you were mentioning seems like you have an awareness, you're aware that you have to do certain things to get a certain outcome. And I think parents sometimes because of our schedule, because we're, you know, some of us are managing relationships, we're married, we're not married, we're dating, we have jobs, we have bills, sometimes we get.
- [39:56]
Jonathan Caron
On, we have two jobs because we got to pay for travel ball and. Yeah, yeah.
- [40:00]
Dr. Jonathan Jenkins
So you get on autopilot and you don't have the ability to course correct or see where you're at and have that awareness. And so gaining that awareness allows you to then prioritize what are the important things that you want to prioritize and what are the things that you're willing to let go that are no longer serving you. They're actually getting in the way of your own self love, but also your relationships.
- [40:21]
Jonathan Caron
Dr. Jenkins, this has been great. We could talk about this forever. For those of you who want more from Dr. Jenkins, he's going to be on the Healthy Sports Parents podcast in a couple weeks. So once you're done listening to this, go check that out. Subscribe there. As a reminder, his new book, Mentality Wins is available on Amazon. Go check it out. It is incredible. You and your kid will both enjoy reading it. Your kid, they're in middle school, high school. They can absolutely ingest what he has in that book. I want to say thanks again to Greg, to Mikey, to the entire youthink team for giving me the offer opportunity to tag in for just a just a week. If you want more from me, you can find it at Healthy Sports Parents on every social media platform. I also have a newsletter that goes out every Friday with a quick tip to help you stay a little more grounded at your kids games just so you can be a little bit more aware like we've been talking about. You can find that@healthysportsparents.com as well. I want to end today like I end every single episode that I do by encouraging you to enjoy your time with your kids, watching them play the sport they love. This journey goes by quicker than we realize and we're going to look back and miss these days. So enjoy it right now. Have a great week everybody. We'll talk again soon.