Parents are integral stakeholders in our youth sport programmes. They often help our athletes get to training or games, have a huge influence on the values and beliefs that they develop, and, ultimately, decide whether their children participate in our programmes at all. Furthermore, when our relationships with parents are good, and our visions are aligned, they can be invaluable allies in supporting children on their sporting journeys.
So how can we build those positive relationships? Below, we discuss how to create constructive dialogues with parents, make them informed partners in our coaching environments, and subsequently improve the sporting experiences we give their children.
Helping Parents to Feel Included
The best way to build constructive relationships with parents is to bring them into our coaching environments — ideally at the start of a new season, or as soon as their children enrol in our programmes.
To deliver athlete-centred youth sport programmes, we should take a facilitative role when setting the culture and expectations within our environment — engaging our athletes and allowing them to drive our values. But it’s crucial that we inform parents of this approach, inviting them to become partners in the process who — like us, as coaches — guide their children in upholding standards.
Meetings at the start of each new season (or with the parents of players who arrive part way through a season) are invaluable ways to help parents understand our collective goals and how we operate, establish lines of communication, and create relationships from the very outset of our programmes.
A common cause of disconnect between coaches and parents is the uncertainty that parents can feel when watching their children participate and not appreciating what they’re seeing. Perhaps they don’t understand why we’re doing certain things in our training sessions, or they cannot see the benefit their child is receiving. In these instances, a simple conversation can go a long way.
It may even help to remind parents that we are trained coaches (just as they are trained professionals in their jobs) and, with openness and honesty, ask for their trust. We can do all of this while reinforcing the message that we still need to work together to create the best possible environments for their children, and that they also have a vital role to play in their kids’ sporting experiences.
Appreciating the Role of Parents
In many grassroots environments, we may only see the children we coach for several hours each week. So one of the best ways to positively impact our athletes is to also influence the time they spend away from our sessions. Perhaps the most effective way to do this is by working with parents — the designers and regulators of the environments in which kids spend much more of their time.
The very first extensions of our coaching environment are often the walk or car ride home. While these moments can easily become a source of anxiety for children, we could instead see them as opportunities to reinforce the positive messages from our sessions — chances to have conversations about the culture, values, and skills that children have learned, rather than to fixate on results or review their mistakes.
We can even give parents potential talking points after training or gameday — for instance, by advising them to ask their children about specific things we’ve worked on. This way, instead of thinking about their own performance, children are encouraged to reflect on their learning and actually teach their parents. Through such a simple initiative, we can help athletes to build confidence by demonstrating what they already know, and bring parents further into the learning process, entrenching that sense of partnership.
Importantly, we must remember that some kids may want to decompress and not discuss their sport at all. This is okay too, and we should be careful not to pressure children to dwell on their performances at training or on gameday if they do not want to.
Here, collaboration is key; as coaches, we have a duty of care to our athletes that extends to parent education, helping parents to understand constructive ways to support their children away from the playing field. To work with parents effectively, we must use a variety of strategies, and maintain constant and consistent dialogues with them throughout the season.
Strategies for Parent Education
Ongoing communication with parents is vital. Athletes’ team or individual objectives, or our methods for helping them achieve those objectives, can often look different over the course of a season, so we must maintain a constant dialogue with parents to help them keep sight of our processes.
A crucial first step is to close the gap between expectations and reality. Naturally, parents have their own expectations of what they’ll see at training or on gameday, formed through their personal experiences (for instance, of playing the adult version of the sport themselves, or watching it played professionally). In youth sport, the gap between their expectations and the reality can be quite large, potentially giving parents a sense of uncertainty regarding our coaching methods, or even their child’s progress.
Again, we can reduce parental expectations (and close the gap) by informing parents about our processes, why we’re doing them, and the developmental pathway that their children are on. Regular, informal meetings, such as coffee mornings before practice (or during training, if we have additional coaches) are effective ways to maintain this dialogue in a spirit of cordiality and collaboration.
Actively ‘crossing the pitch’ to talk to parents after games or competitions is another powerful way to forge a sense of trust and understanding. Parents naturally construct their own narratives of what they’re seeing — perhaps more so upon feeling the emotion of a competitive event — but we can shape that narrative by debriefing them (as well as our athletes) afterwards. By effectively narrating the game for parents — for example, “This is what happened; those were some of the things we worked on in training this week; next week, we’ll be working on this…” — we can, once more, help them to understand our processes and alleviate any desire to fixate on results or other outcomes.
Ultimately, building positive relationships with parents is a matter of communication. By building an honest and ongoing dialogue, we can help them to become informed partners in their children’s sporting experiences, and allies in the creation of our coaching environments. It will certainly make our lives as coaches easier. But, undoubtedly, the biggest beneficiaries will be our athletes.
In Summary
- We should open a dialogue with parents as soon as their children enrol in our programme.
- We can make parents feel valued and included by informing them of our programme’s values, objectives, and the rationale behind them.
- Parents are an extension of our coaching environment; we must work with them to positively impact our athletes outside of our sessions.
- We should endeavour to close the gap between parental expectations and reality, thereby helping them to understand their children’s developmental journey.
- Through debriefings on gameday, we can shape the narrative that parents form from the sidelines, minimising anxiety about their children’s performances.
- Positive coach-parent relationships are integral to facilitating great sporting experiences for young athletes.
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