The Other Kids and the Other Parents: A Survival Guide

Comparing your child to other athletes is close to automatic at a meet. Your kid is being ranked by the other kids on the team, and you are being ranked by their parents, using your child as the score. Nobody announces either one. Both are real, and they are the same thing wearing two jackets.

The Sorting Starts With the Kids

A British research team ran two studies about a decade apart, asking children how the people around them affected their motivation: forty children aged seven to eleven, then seventy-nine aged nine to eighteen across twenty-six sports. Both asked about coaches, parents and teammates. Most research stops at the adults.

In both studies, the same category came out of the children's own words: linking competence to social outcomes. A girl of seven and a half put it like this: "Saying mean things [like] um, 'You're in the wrong group,' and 'That's rubbish! You're not being my friend any more.'"

The rule operating in your child's sport is that how good you are decides how much you get to belong. It is still running at thirteen, and it isn't the coach's doing or yours.

But a second category sat beside the first, in the same data: separating competence from social outcomes. Some children simply did not make the link, and where it was never made, the researchers noted, it never got created. So it isn't a law of childhood. It's a habit. You cannot install it in the locker room, but you can decide whether it exists in your car.

The Same Teammate, Two Different Reactions

The younger study asked what happens when a teammate is visibly better than you, one of yours rather than a distant rival. Two answers came back: "That makes you think 'Oh why am I bothering then?'" and "I'm going to be as good as you" and then try harder.

Same event, opposite outcomes. The researchers report both, and they do not say what decides which one a child has on a given day. Nobody has run that study. So your version doesn't determine your child's.

But it is one of the versions available to him, and unlike the others, yours gets a twenty-five-minute run at him in a moving car with nowhere else to look. Worth knowing before the next cry in the back seat on the way home.

When the Competition Is Inside the Team

A researcher spent a full season inside one basketball club in the north of England, asking players, parents and coaches what produced their outcomes, then counting how many separate harms each proposed cause was named in.

Internal competition came first. Not a bad coach, not pushy parents, but the boys competing against each other for squad places and minutes. It was named in the making of five separate harms: pressure, no social life, selfishness, low confidence, and bullying within the team.

Here's the half you must not skip. Only a few of the lower-ranked boys actually ended up that way, because the club gave every boy an individual training plan. Every boy had his own thing to work on, and the club's identity was strong enough that belonging was worth something on its own. A private yardstick, and somewhere to belong that isn't the depth chart.

Neither is yours to hand out, but you can notice which of them your child's team has. It's a better tryout question than "how good is the coach." If your child is absorbing the cost of that depth chart right now, a bench season has its own playbook.

Somewhere in the Middle, the Job Changes Hands

Researchers in Hong Kong surveyed 408 swimmers aged nine to eighteen and modeled who drives how hard these kids try. For the younger group, a mother's encouragement was the strongest single thing in the model, and teammates barely showed up. For the fifteen-to-eighteens it had completely swapped: teammates strongest by a distance, a mother's encouragement no longer registering. It's a Hong Kong sample, so hold it loosely. Nobody who has raised a fifteen-year-old finds the direction surprising.

In the nine-to-twelves, teammates being harsh about mistakes predicted more nerves before racing; encouraging teammates predicted fewer. At ten, the thing setting your child's stomach on a Saturday morning may be the eight kids standing next to him. You can't fix that from the stands, but you can stop assuming a suddenly anxious kid has developed a problem with the sport. Sometimes he's developed a problem with a boy.

Are the Other Parents Keeping Score Too?

This part is about you, and it's the layer underneath why a child fears disappointing you more than failing.

Researchers in England interviewed ten parents, five mothers and five fathers, whose sons were at professional football academies. Elite end, so hold the specifics loosely. The mechanics are the ones running at a middle school track meet. The parents were ranked by each other, and the researchers wrote down the criteria.

You were rated well if you were realistic about your kid's chances, knew how development works, and were seen not to push. You were rated badly if you talked about your son making it, looked like you were pressuring him, or if your son was one of the less talented players. Part of your standing is set by a thirteen-year-old's foot speed, which you do not control. One father said it out loud: "If your kid's up there, you're one of the good parents … you see the parents' body language, slinks a bit."

The study documents the rating, not what parents do about it. Take the rest as a reasonable read, not a finding: only one of the two scales can be faked. You can't make your son faster by Saturday, but you can perform not caring, and so everybody does. That's why you said "oh, he's just doing it for fun" about a boy who has been asking about the relay since February. It isn't lying, exactly. It's the entry fee. The one place you could say the true thing out loud, I want this for him so badly it frightens me, is the one place where saying it costs you standing.

A hockey coach in Canada noticed that a private complaint, once shared with other parents, stopped being a doubt and became a fact: "Other parents agreed with me and said my son is playing well." A doubt validated in the stands doesn't stay there. An eleven-year-old in a Greek study named it unprompted: "The parents of my teammates are very nice but a little vulgar at times."

The support down there is real, though. Newer parents learn what the season will be like, somebody covers a ride, somebody understands the stress your friends outside sport don't. Every sideline friendship is held together by two children staying in the same sport, so a small part of you needs your son on that team for reasons that have nothing to do with your son. Keep one friendship with no connection to the sport at all.

What Travels Home in Somebody Else's Car

Canadian researchers put audio recorders on youth hockey families for a whole tournament weekend: the arena, the hotel, the car. Nobody was being interviewed. They forgot the recorder was on, which is the point.

A mother and father, driving, their son in the back: "Is it just me or is [the teammate] scared of being hit? Keep an eye out." … "He's as small as a mosquito." Two tired adults doing what tired adults do. But look at what the boy in the back has been handed. Not an opinion about a teammate. A method: watch the small one, he flinches.

Then the recording the researchers flag themselves: another boy in the car, a teammate catching a ride, when the athlete called an opposing player something ugly and his mother agreed out loud. That teammate has a house to go home to, and somebody will ask him how the ride was.

So assume the car is public. Not because you'll get caught, but because it is public. Whatever you say in there is in the possession of a thirteen-year-old, and thirteen-year-olds are not a secure system. The version your child keeps is worse: he learns that in this family, teammates are things we assess. Somebody taught somebody that. Not you, probably. But somebody's parent, in some car.

The Kids Who Didn't Get in the Van

There's one more set of other kids, and they live in your house.

Researchers in England interviewed eight academy boys and their parents separately, in different rooms. One father, on the son who plays: "I have spent a ridiculous amount of time with him as opposed to the other two." He justifies it, and may be right. The part I want is that he knows, and he said it to a stranger without being pushed. You know too. It's the thing you think about at eleven at night: the daughter who has done homework alone at the kitchen table forty Saturdays running.

There isn't a fix. Two children, one car, one weekend is arithmetic, not parenting. What there is instead is what a twelve-year-old hockey player said about her parents: "She drove me there like every weekend, just for these trials, and I felt like quite proud, because I had a mum who cared about what I did."

Nobody told her that driving was love. She worked it out from the car being there. You don't have to say what it costs. She can see it, and so can your other child. That's the worry, and also the way through: not a speech about fairness, but showing up at something of hers, on a Saturday, with nothing else in the calendar.

What to Actually Do With All of This

Ask what happened, not who's better: "What was he doing on the last hundred?" Description is safe. Ranking isn't. Never link skill and friendship in a sentence, even kindly, because "Are you two still friends after that?" teaches him the two are connected. Offer the other reading once, then stop. Pushing turns it into a demand that he feel fine. And when he defends a teammate, get out of the way.

On the sideline, decide in the parking lot what you're there for: one child, not a scouting trip. Take a compliment without spending another child on it. Don't co-sign a complaint in front of children. "Huh" is a complete sentence. In the car, no teammate's name in a sentence with a verdict in it.

If you need to say the unsayable thing, say it to an adult, later, somewhere else. The test: would I say this with his teammate in the back seat? Because half the time, there is one.

For the deeper version of all of it, the drive home, the silence, the things that get said in a moving car, The Drive Home is the field guide I'd hand a parent before the season starts.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I stop comparing my child to other athletes?

Catch the sentence before it leaves your mouth. Most comparison starts as a question about someone else's kid, and you can turn it into a question about yours: "What was he doing on that last hundred?" rather than "Why can't you do that?" You won't stop noticing. You can stop narrating.

Is it bad to talk about other kids at all?

No, kids talk about teammates constantly, and pretending otherwise is strange. The problem is a comparison that ranks your child against them. Talk about what another player did well and leave your child out of the sentence.

What if my child is the one comparing himself to a teammate?

Ask what he admires about the other kid, then help him turn it into one thing he can practice. Envy without a next step just sits there. If the comparison has turned into "I'm not good enough," that's worth a separate conversation, and our post on a child saying they aren't good enough covers it.

The honest answer is that comparing your child to other athletes never fully stops, because youth sports is built to invite it. What you control is whether the ranking gets spoken out loud in your car. Keep it quiet there, keep one friendship that has nothing to do with the team, and the noise stays where it belongs.

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Mike V. Clark writes about the mental side of youth sports at Winning the Inner Game. His book, Winning the Inner Game: Mental Tools for Young Athletes to Develop Grit, Focus, and Emotional Control, is published by Moonbury Publishing.