Parents frequently ask me about pushing their child. They are unsure of the fine line between offering encouragement and opportunities and pushing an activity onto their child. When children begin organized athletics, the parent almost always makes the decision, as few five, six, or seven year-olds know what they want to do; at the same time, almost any kind of activity is interesting to a child at that age. 

Once the child joins an organized sports team or league, and the child shows an interest in the activity, how much should a parent push? If all the other children are going to private trainers, should my child? If I do not take my child to extra lessons, am I failing my child or allowing him or her to fall behind? If I take my child to extra lessons, am I pushing the sport too much?

Parents know that practice is necessary for the child to improve. However, how much does an eight-year-old need to improve? Does he need to be the best player on his team or in his league? Is it better to play multiple sports even if it means not being the star in any of them?

An old blog on The Nation of Wimps web site differentiates spoiling one’s children from overparenting.

“Overparenting is driven by the demands of the adult. And it isn’t necessarily focused on things….A parent consumed by anxiety for a child’s achievement calls a teacher to protest a grade given to the student. Or sends a kid off to ballet camp with an eye to developing an array of extracurricular skills that will ultimately impress college admissions officers. It isn’t necessarily something the child has asked for. It is something that soothes the parental anxiety.”

I used to train a lot of young athletes. These players played on their team, but they or their parents believed that they needed more instruction or more practice. Rather than seek the additional practice on their own or by playing pick-up games at the park, they sought out individual or small-group training.

Nowadays, children do not seem to practice or play on their own. Their lives are scheduled from early childhood. Therefore, to practice outside of the team’s practice, a parent has to schedule the additional training. Is this a sign of overparenting?

My sister teaches at a private elementary school, so I hear frequently about parents calling about grades. Last summer, I taught an undergraduate course and saw the product of this overparenting. The students turned in terrible work and expected A’s. University students who did not spell check a paper were indignant when they did not receive an A. Of course they were. Their parents likely complained to their teachers all the way through high school, regardless of the quality of their work. My sister explained to a parent once that the student had not turned in homework for weeks and had not attended a single review/tutoring session that she had offered. The parent’s response was that the bad grade would hurt his high school application. The parent did not say, “Oh. I’m sorry. I will find out why my son is not doing his homework and make sure that he attends the tutoring sessions to catch up.” Instead, it was the teacher’s fault that the student could not be bothered to do his work.

As The Nation of Wimps blog continues:

“Overparented kids wind up without a sense of self. They grow up overly compliant. They lack coping skills because everything has been done for them by anxious parents. They’re weak from within, and it’s a pervasive weakness. The grow up risk-averse and unable to make decisions on their own. They, too, have a low tolerance for frustration.”

Through our interactions as coaches, parents, and teachers, we are setting up these children and teenagers for failure, often out of our best intentions. Athletes with a low tolerance for frustration are unlikely to succeed at a very high level. Developing talent is a process filled with frustration, as improvement requires practicing on the edge of one’s ability where mistakes are frequent. If these athletes lack coping skills, they will struggle to push themselves to improve, and they will struggle every time that they move up a level and face better competition. Nobody achieves a high level of success in any discipline without some struggles.

John Wooden is famous for his quote, “Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be.” It seems like with this generation, parents, teachers, and coaches are afraid to allow children to fail. Making mistakes and failing is not bad, unless the person lacks the coping skills to handle the missteps. By not allowing children to fall flat on their faces, adults are interfering with the development of these coping skills. In terms of developing talented individuals, these skills are more important than constant and early success.

Daniel Coyle, author of The Talent Code, wrote on his blog about the new way to identify talent. The two factors are early ownership and grit.

“One pattern of successful athletes happens when they’re 13 or so, when they develop a sense of ownership of their training. For the ones who succeed, this age is when they decide that it’s not enough to simply be an obedient cog in the development machine — they begin to go farther, reaching beyond the program, deciding for themselves what their workouts will be, augmenting and customizing and addressing their weaknesses on their own.”

Overparenting would seem to exclude the opportunity for early ownership. If a parent’s anxiety leads him or her to sign the child up for more training, how does the child learn to take ownership for his or her development? Instead, these players tend to learn that to practice means to go to a lesson. They practice less because they never practice on their own. They are accustomed to having a coach or trainer direct their practice. These players will plateau because they lack the drive to go further and augment and customize their own workouts.

“Another tell is grit. This quality, investigated by the pioneering work of Angela Duckworth, refers to that signature combination of stubbornness, resourcefulness, creativity and adaptability that helps someone make the tough climb toward a longterm goal” (Coyle, 2012).

With overparenting, the child may not learn this stubbornness. If the parent gets the teacher to change a grade or transfers the player to a new team if he is not playing enough or taking enough shots, how does the player learn resourcefulness and adaptability? In the future, when facing those tough situations that require grit, will he have learned these lessons? If he lacks grit, will he handle and overcome frustrations?

By Brian McCormick, M.S.S., PES
Coach/Clinician, Brian McCormick Basketball
Author, Cross Over: The New Model of Youth Basketball Development
Director of Coaching, Playmakers Basketball Development League

A recent article from the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports titled “Late specialization: the key to success in centimeters, grams, or seconds (cgs) sports” concluded that athletes who specialized later (mid to late teens) fared better than those who specialized in a sport at an earlier age. In truth, the study focused more on training volume, than specialization.

The study compared near-elite to elite athletes in Denmark. The near-elite group practiced more in their sport between the ages of 0-9, 9-12 and 12-15, and their training volume peaked during the 12-15 age group. The elite group gradually increased its training volume and surpassed the near-elites between 15-18 and 18-21. The researchers used this information to conclude that those who specialize late (mid to late teens) rather than early (prior to the onset of puberty) ultimately reach a higher level of performance.

The problem, as Dr. Ross Tucker pointed out on his blog, The Science of Sport, is that training volume does not mean specialization. The near-elites averaged 10.49 hours per week of training in their sport (compared to 8.14 hours for the elites) in the 12-15 age category; that leaves time for participation in another sport or activity.

Dr. Tucker proposed two models to explain the training volume trajectories: (1) motivation/psychological and (2) talent/physiological. Of course, as with most things, the answer lies somewhere in the middle.

The talent model suggests that the athletes with a higher ceiling likely needed less practice as youths because they fared well competitively without the extra practice – they are naturally gifted. Their peers with lower ceilings had to practice more to keep up and stay competitive, but as the athletes moved toward higher levels of competition and specialization in their late teens, their ceiling came into view, and they realized that they lacked the stuff (height, fast-twitch muscle fiber, strength, etc) of elite competitors so their practice declined. Essentially, they hit their performance peak in their mid-teens and their effort and practice gradually tailed off as they realized they were not going to make it to the elite level.

The psychological model suggests that parents were the primary motivator for the near-elites during their higher training volume as youths and early teens, and as these athletes progressed, they either found other interests, burned out or lacked the internal motivation to persist through more demanding training. The elite group started slower and built their internal motivation.

Both models caution against early specialization. In the talent model, early specialization is not enough to overcome lack of natural talent in the long run. In the motivation model, early specialization leads athletes to burnout or quit before they reach the elite level. Either way, whether through motivation or talent, those who progress gradually and specialize later reach a higher level of performance in the long run.

An alternative explanation is the concept of Mindset developed by Stanford University professor Dr. Carol Dweck. Rather than the near-elites hitting their ceiling after early success, the early success may have led to the development of a Fixed Mindset. Because they were good and talented during childhood, people (parents, coaches, teachers) likely focused on the outcome in their feedback. Meanwhile, the late bloomers who were not as successful in early childhood may have received more effort-related feedback which developed a Growth Mindset.

Player A grows early. He is a big, strong, aggressive player who dominates because of his speed, strength and size between the ages of 9 and 15. His identity starts to become one of a jock. He is praised for performance, so he focuses on his strengths to maximize performance – he relies on his size, speed and strength advantages to bully other players.

People expect performance and constantly reward him for his performance. Parents say things like “You scored 2 goals; you’re a great player.” Consequently, he develops a Fixed Mindset and believes in his innate talent. He spends less time developing other skills because any skill which causes an initial struggle damages his ego and decreases his motivation to practice. He concentrates on demonstrating his talent and views mistakes – a requisite for learning and development – as a sign of failure, so he quits the task.

Player B, meanwhile, cannot bully other players. As a late bloomer, he is less successful between 9-15, so he is unlikely to wrap up his identity in being a jock. He finds ways to stay in the game with his hustle, tenacity and maybe a key skill.

He hears comments from coaches and parents pertaining to his effort, “You’re important to the team because you play really hard” rather than his performance and this leads to a Growth Mindset. When he practices, he does not view mistakes as a threat to his ego; instead, mistakes are an opportunity for improvement. When he makes a mistake, it motivates him to work harder to master the task. When he eventually masters the task, it enhances his motivation to work harder and master a newer, harder task.

At 16, let’s say, the two players equal out in size, strength and speed. Player B is now more skilled, so he moves ahead of Player A. Player A will be de-motivated because of his early success and his Fixed Mindset. He will perceive their equality as a sign that he is not good enough or that he has hit his ceiling, while Player B will perceive himself as just starting to grow into his ability.

Player A did not peak necessarily. Instead, he needs to develop the skills that he ignored. Rather than relying on his physical advantages, now that the advantages have disappeared, he needs to augment his physical talent with greater skill, technique and game understanding. However, he has a Fixed Mindset, and developing skills at that point is hard, especially when he is used to being the best, so he is de-motivated.

People with Fixed Mindsets do not practice hard because it is a sign of a lack of talent, and they believe in innate talent. Athletes at this age often do not practice hard or play hard so they have an excuse; they can blame their effort, not their lack of talent. They say things like “I could have won if I wanted, but I didn’t feel like playing hard today.”

Meanwhile, Player B with his Growth Mindset starts to see the result of his effort – he starts to improve and perform better and that reinforces his Growth Mindset. Rather than attributing his success to his talent – as does the early bloomer – he attributes his success to his work ethic, which fuels even more practice and effort.

This Mindset changes their practice habits at this point, as reflected in the training volume in the study. Player B works harder and keeps improving, while Player A does not work as hard and stops improving, as he wants to protect his talent and his ego. This does not mean that Player A hit his ceiling; maybe he simply hit a plateau and perceived it to be his ceiling. His Mindset affects his perceptions differently than Player B even though their talent, physiology and current performance level may be the same.

In a sense, it is not necessarily the early training volume or the early specialization, but the adulation from the early success, and the inability to maintain that childhood dominance, that led to the phenomena in the study. The way that coaches and parents provide feedback to a child athlete is of critical importance and may contribute to the patterns seen in the Danish study.

Physiology and genetics differ. Everyone has a different ceiling. However, very few individuals reach their ceiling in terms of athletic performance. Lance Armstrong probably maximized his physical gifts to their fullest; but, how many others truly push to the ceiling of their capabilities, either because they never find the right sport, never find the right training program, never find the right competitive environment, etc?

Every time society believes that humankind has reached the limit on human performance, someone surpasses it, like with the four-minute mile. Once the original surpasses that limit, suddenly dozens of others are able to surpass it. Does that mean the others improved their physical prowess once someone else paved the way or does it relate to the psychological limitations we place upon our performance?

By Brian McCormick
Brian McCormick Basketball
Author, Cross Over: The New Model of Youth Basketball Development
Director of Coaching, Playmakers Basketball Development League

In the lead-up to the 2010 World Cup, Michael Sokolove wrote “How a Soccer Star is Made” in the New York Times about Ajax, a club team in Amsterdam famous for its Total Football style of play and the development of young soccer stars, including several who played for the Netherlands in South Africa. Despite its small size and population, the soccer world looks to the Netherlands, and specifically to Ajax, for its methods of developing youth soccer talent.

Despite its international success in numerous sports, the United States lacks a definitive development system. In most team sports, players bounce from recreation leagues to club teams to school teams with little to no coordination, progression or consistency between leagues, clubs, schools, teams and coaches.

In effect, the system creates a “survival of the fittest” process, as the biggest, strongest athletes receive more playing time and are selected for teams as children get older and the competitive stream narrows.

In Cross Over: The New Model of Youth Basketball Development, I categorize four athlete types: Recreational, Developmental, Competitive and Elite. When I was young, children progressed through the first three types gradually and at one’s own pace.

I played on soccer and baseball teams when I was seven-years-old, but there was no performance pressure. These teams were about having fun and making new friends. Eventually I started to play basketball and quickly decided that I wanted to be a good player, so I practiced on my own and attended camps. I played on teams focused more on teaching fundamentals and preparing players to make high school teams than winning games.

When I reached high school, tryouts for teams grew very competitive, and those who made the team competed for league, area and state championships. The better players sought more developmental experiences to expand their games and their athleticism to prepare for college sports or professional careers.

Now, many children completely ignore the recreational and developmental steps, as teams quickly turn competitive. Youth teams focus on winning games and tournaments and play far more than they train. Youth teams often practice once or twice per week and play in weekend tournaments with three to five games.

The Ajax system largely skips the recreational step as well. Ajax uses scouts who scour the countryside for potential professional footballers as young as five-years-old. Those invited to the the academy enter into a prolonged developmental stage. “The boys are not overplayed…Through age 12, they train only three times per week and play one game on the weekend” (Sokolove).

The academy focuses on the process, not the results. The goal is to move players from the developmental programs quickly through a competitive period in their late teens and on to the elite (professional) level at a young age (late teens/early twenties).

Youth sport is a billion-dollar business in the United States, and the entrepreneurialism affects the environment in which youth players develop. Likewise, the Ajax academy is very much a business, and its approach to business influences its approach to youth development.

In the U.S., a youth athlete is a commodity. Coaches, instructors, facilities, leagues and clubs profit immediately from participation and increase revenue by increasing quantities. More tournaments with more teams and more players per team mean more revenue for the businessmen (coaches/tournament operators).

Ajax treats youth athletes like an investment or asset, and it profits by maximizing the asset’s talent and selling the asset to a bigger, richer club as the asset matures. Wesley Sneijder, the star of the Dutch National team and Serie A (Italy’s top league) champion Inter Milan, started with Ajax when he was seven, and Real Madrid bought his contract for 27 million euros when he was 23.

The different business approaches create different positives and negatives. For a player entering the Ajax system, he receives professional coaching throughout his childhood and every possible resource to maximize his talent. Ajax’s style of play “demands the highest order of individual skill: players with a wizard-like ability to control the ball with either foot, any part of the foot, and work it toward the goal through cramped spaces and barely perceptible lanes.”

Rather than engage in common drills, “training largely consists of small-sided games and drills in which players line-up in various configurations, move quickly and kick the ball very hard to each other at close range…these exercises [are] designed to maximize touches, or contact with the ball.”

While teams in the U.S. compete to win games, even at the youngest ages, the Ajax academy is more concerned with developing players. Once the players develop their individual technical and tactical skills and move to higher levels of competitions, Ajax cares more about the results. However, at the young ages, the process of developing the player supersedes any result.

U.S. teams often pigeon-hole players into positions and concentrate solely on position-specific skills. Rather than concentrate on important skills like field vision and a player’s first touch, fullbacks are taught to boot the ball out of trouble and midfielders send low-percentage through balls to strikers whose role is to shoot on goal. Teams concentrate on winning the next game, not developing skills for the long term.

Most differently, a child selected to train at Ajax incurs no fees except a nominal insurance charge. The academy pays for its professional staff as an investment – the business’s research and development budget. In the U.S., players pay to play, and more competitive teams or clubs with better coaching typically cost more than local or recreational leagues.

The negative side of Ajax’s investment is that when it becomes apparent that a player lacks the requisite talent or skill to develop into a professional player, the academy dismisses him.

These players, and there are many as only so many players reach the professional side each season, suffer emotionally and socially. One unnamed youth player said, “My best friend left [was cut] two years ago…I don’t speak to him anymore. He thought that I was not in touch enough, that I was not supporting him. He was furious. I realized he was just a football friend and that you can’t have real friends at Ajax” (Sokolove).

While the U.S. system may not provide the professional coaching like a European club’s academy, many youth players develop life-long friends through youth sports. My best friends are guys who I played against in middle school who became my high school teammates.

Our coaches were parent volunteers and while they may not have been baseball, soccer or basketball experts, they insured a safe environment where we had fun and made friends (several friends did earn college scholarships or play professionally).

Beyond the social aspects are academic and other non-soccer pursuits. Another player said, “I would feel very bad if I’m not one of them [professional player]. I have tried everything I can do to make it. I haven’t done as much in school as I could. I would feel like I’ve been wasting my time all these years. I would get very depressed” (Sokolove).

Many youths in the States pursue college or professional careers and manage to excel academically and in other pursuits. When their competitive careers end, they transfer the athletic lessons like determination or work ethic to new pursuits in academia, coaching, business, parenting and other areas of their lives. When asked if he might have learned something at Ajax which would benefit him in a non-football life, this boy answered, “No. We’re training for football, not for anything else.”

Unfortunately, youth development in the U.S. appears to be adopting some of the negative consequences of the Ajax’s academy without incorporating the positives. While many coaches remain volunteers and the progression between age groups, leagues and teams remains disjointed, more and more youth athletes feel a pressure to reach a certain goal – usually a college scholarship – to feel like their athletic endeavors had a purpose. Without the scholarship, they feel they wasted their time.

In Drive, Daniel Pink describes the Sawyer Effect: practices that can either turn play into work or turn work into play. Many children no longer play sports; they train or work at sports, even from a young age. When this work fails to result in the end-goal or a pay-off for the effort, they feel like a failure. They do not remember the fun of playing a game, learning new things or challenging oneself. Instead, they view the time spent pursuing an unrealized goal as time lost.

There is a fine line between the benefits of a professional development system like Ajax and the ruination of children’s games and play for the sake of playing. While a more balanced approach to training and competition and better organized practices may enhance a child’s experience and his talent development, is it worth the possibility that he views sports as work rather than play? Is it so bad if some players squander some of their athletic talent because they pursue multiple sports or act in plays or start a band?

Should the business of youth sports cater to the development of professional athletes or promote healthy living and life-long activity? I certainly advocate for changes to the way that we develop youth athletes in the United States, but part of the change must be a return to play for the sake of playing.

“Recreational” should not be viewed as a bad word or a dumbed-down program for the uncompetitive. Young athletes need a healthy progression from recreational to developmental to competitive to elite (if good enough) based on their own interests and motivations. Playing sports should be fun, not work, and nobody should view their youth sports experience as time wasted regardless of the outcome.

By Brian McCormick
Author, Cross Over: The New Model of Youth Basketball Development
Director of Coaching, Playmakers Basketball Development League

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The father of two Long Island junior tennis prospects has been stripped of custody by a New York state judge who found their rigorous training schedule to be “overly burdensome, exhausting and completely unacceptable.”

The Cavallero brothers — Giancarlo, 10, and Jordy, 5 — were required to leave school early to spend six hours a day at tennis practice and play tournaments on the weekends.

But in a ruling last week, Acting Supreme Court Justice Norman St. George of Nassau County found the “grueling” training regimen had left the children “constantly tired, regularly late to school … and their tennis appears to be negatively impacted.”

On the other hand, I saw this video on Yahoo! Sports of MMA fighter Jens Pulver’s son Karson.

Look at the form on his squats! Sometimes, the early start is fun and games and encouraging an active lifestyle. However, sometimes dreams and ambitions lead to a loss of perspective. Sometimes, it is a fine line to walk between pushing too much and starting too early and just letting a child have fun.

“My mother was the greatest mother in the world. She thought I was the greatest thing on two feet. I’d come home with a little composition I had written at school and she’d look at it and say, ‘It’s wonderful! You’re another Shakespeare! I always assumed that I could do anything. It really is amazing how much that has to do with your attitude.”

For more thoughts on parenting through the athletic process, read:

• A Parents’ Guide to Talent Development
• Developing your Son or Daughter into an Athletic Superstar
• Developing your Son or Daughter into an Athletic Superstar, Part II

At the gym this week, I watched a seventh grader work with a personal shooting coach for an hour. After his lesson, his mother spoke to another coach and had the coach watch her son and offer pointers. Then, the child shot for another hour as his mother watched and critiqued every shot. After the child had shot for two-and-a-half hours, he started to whine. He wanted to go home. His mother told him to make 20 free throws in a row. Eventually, a team had practice and kicked him off the court.

When I was young, I imagine there were days when I shot by myself for two hours. I know I set goals like making 20 shots in a row before going inside. However, I made the decisions. I initiated the practice, I set my own goals, I decided when to finish. My individual practice was child-initiated and based on my motivations. I practiced because I enjoyed shooting.

The mother initiated the child’s practice, setting goals, hiring trainers and talking to coaches. The child did not want to continue. He was not enjoying the activity. His body slumped after every missed shot that prolonged his practice, he whined and he threw the ball. Maybe the mother wanted to teach her son a lesson about practice habits, work ethic or discipline. However, I saw a child starting to hate basketball.

In the United States, we face an obesity epidemic. Children are fat. However, we also have turned childhood sports into a scholarship chase. I believe the obesity issues stem from the same misguided philosophy which turned youth sports into the pursuit of the ephemeral dream, rather than a time for fun, activity, learning and exploration.

Parents rush their children into competitive athletics because they do not want their son or daughter to fall behind. These efforts are misguided. K. Anders Ericsson, author of The Road to Excellence, believes “when it comes to choosing a life path, you should do what you love because if you don’t love it, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good.”

Ericsson believes a person needs hours of deliberate practice to become an expert performer. In a sense, the mother provided an environment for deliberate practice. This is the approach parents take. They know their child needs to practice and work hard to be successful, so they start the child down this path at earlier and earlier ages, like the mother of the six-year-old. However, the parents miss the first requirement: kids must love what they are doing. Pushing a child into an activity too hard and too soon often has the opposite effect, turning the child against the activity.

When a child quits sports at an early age, he is less likely to resume these activities later. Kids love to learn and explore. They do not compare themselves to others. They enjoy playing and learning. However, as we age, we become more self-conscious and more aware of others.

A teenager is unlikely to try a new sport because he does not want to fail. People associate a failure in an activity with a character flaw and worry others might like them less just because they cannot shoot a basketball or catch a football. While it is easy to dismiss these feelings, how many adults actively pursue activities in which they are not very good or have never tried? Now, imagine doing so during adolescence. No wonder P.E. is the worst class of the day for many kids.

Once upon a time, children played hopscotch at recess and jumped off swings at the highest peak. They jumped over (or into) puddles and skipped just for fun. Jumping rope was a game children played to song.

Now, as recess disappears and the pursuit of a scholarship grips parents as soon as their young prodigy takes his first steps, personal trainers painstakingly count the number of foot touches in a plyometric workout to prevent over-training and burnout. Depth jumps are prohibited for all but the most advanced children. The play activities of past generations are regimented training activities used to prepare young athletes for sporting success.

In The Art of Learning, Josh Waitzkin, a world champion in chess and Judo, writes: “the most important factor in these first few months of study was that Bruce [his first chess coach] nurtured my love for chess, and he never let technical material smother my innate feelings for the game.” Eventually, Waitzkin moved to more intense levels of training and instruction. However, this occurred after he developed a passion for chess and a desire to pursue the sport.

In the gym, the mother failed to nurture her son’s love for basketball though her efforts stemmed from a good place. As we change physical activity from fun games to training activities, we lose children who are uninterested in or psychologically unprepared for the competitive nature of youth athletics.

The media points to the dedication of Tiger Woods at an early age to illustrate successful athletic development. However, how many young prodigies never make it? These are the stories left untold. Parents and coaches latch onto the Tiger Woods’ story, but nobody learns from Todd Marinovich or Jennifer Capriati or the dozens of others who quit sports altogether before they reached any level of noteworthiness. Rather than looking at Woods as the rule, what if he is the exception? What if he developed in spite of the pushing, not because of it? What if Woods, like Waitzkin, developed the passion for the game first and then engaged in the deliberate practice which elevated him into the world’s greatest golfer? The media only captures part of the story; maybe the real story is the fun games that he played with his father when he was young which generated his intense interest in golf.

Youth sports are not the pre-minor leagues. Children are not miniature professionals. Whether the goal is to develop your child into an All-American or just to keep your child active, the method is the same: youth sports should be fun, child-centered, exploratory and learning-oriented, not a competitive cauldron or pre-professional training.

Brian McCormick is the Performance Director for Train for Hoops.