Parenting an Athlete: What Prioritizing Mental Fitness Looks Like | Well+Good

Soon afterward, Livingstone began the work to face down the mental health challenges of anxiety, depression, stress, and low self-esteem associated with her training. She returned to swimming even stronger as a Division 1 college athlete—and eventually built a career as a consultant for athletes, coaches, and teams specializing in mental health and performance.

Now a mother of four, she can’t help but think back to the emotional highs and lows of her swimming career as she watches and guides her tween and teen children in their own athletic pursuits. As Livingstone and her eldest daughter, Kylie, returned from a weekend hockey tournament, anger, frustration, and sadness hung in the air. Kylie’s team had won the first two games of the important tournament—a showcase for college scouts—but the third had been a blowout, and not in Kylie’s team’s favor.

Livingstone had a flashback to a national championship meet in high school where her swimming performance wasn’t up to her usual standard. Out of the pool, she recalled, her mom greeted her and said, “Good job, I love you”—and Livingstone exploded at her. “How could you say ‘good job’ after that?!”

Now facing her own daughter’s disappointment, what was the right thing say?

#OlympicParents

Since video of gymnast Aly Raisman’s parents in the stands contorting along with her uneven bars routine at the 2012 Summer Olympics went viral, the Olympic spotlight has expanded from the athletic and emotional journey of athletes to that of their parents, too.

During the 2016 Summer Olympics, cameras eagerly re-trained their lenses on Raisman’s parents and others, and articles and documentaries came out about parental dedication and how raising an Olympic athlete can “take over” family life. While the COVID-rescheduled Summer Olympics of 2021 restricted family attendance in Tokyo, the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing produced plenty of warm-and-fuzzy viral parent moments, like the heart-stealing signs and tears of Chloe Kim’s father.

Now, as the 2024 Paris Olympics coincide with the supremacy of bite-size viral video made for social media, media outlets are already going all-in on the phenomenon of the Olympic parent. NBC is churning out videos of parents from the trials as they twist, yell, and claw while watching their children. News outlets are doing roundups of their favorite family reactions. During the games, the network even plans to outfit some parents with heart rate monitors, and will display these parental palpitations on the screen while the wearers’ children compete.

“Can we help cultivate an elite level of performance and also [raise them to be] healthy and well and intact?”—Samantha Livingstone, M.S.Ed., Olympic gold medalist and performance consultant

Whether you can commiserate with these parents and the stress of watching your child attempt something big, or if you feel like they really need to take a chill pill, attention expanding from Olympic athlete to Olympic family might actually be a good thing.

“There may be a lot of benefit and upside to putting the spotlight on parents to humanize us,” Livingstone says. “I don’t know that enough people talk about, ‘Yeah, I’m a parent, and I also feel all these things.’”

That conversation may be helpful for both parents and their child athletes. How parents navigate the emotional ups and downs of their child’s sport can have a direct effect on that child’s mental health—or, as it’s known in sports, “mental fitness.” Mental fitness is the ability to weather wins and losses, ups and downs, to know when to push through challenges, and when to pause, to maintain an immense level of dedication.

“Can we help cultivate an elite level of performance and also [raise them to be] healthy and well and intact?” asks Livingstone. “That doesn’t mean we’re not going to face disappointment and face challenges, in fact that’s part of the process. But can we do both together?”

Pressure on athletes and their parents has reached a fever pitch

Considering the full impact of a family’s involvement in sports—and why that involvement has become so intense—is an important place to start when answering the question of how to help a child develop mental fitness. Simone Biles and Naomi Osaka opening up about their burnout, depression, and anxiety as they pulled out of the 2020 Olympics and 2021 French Open, respectively, has led some to wonder how we’ve gotten to this place—and to a world where over 70 percent of young athletes experience burnout¹ by the age of 13, according to a 2024 report from the American Academy of Pediatrics.

“Sports are such a powerful and fun motivator to keep youth physically and mentally active, but some youth may feel pressure from parents, coaches, and others to measure success only by performance,” Joel S. Brenner, MD, MPH, a fellow of the AAP and an author of the report, said in an AAP statement.

It’s natural to wonder about parents’ role in this state of affairs. Are parents getting too invested in the athletic achievements of their offspring, putting them on teams and in environments where they are meant to win at all costs, even sometimes risking their safety²? Are these children just part of the generation experiencing unprecedented levels of stress, which many experts attribute to an inability to tolerate negative emotions? Are they merely a product of a world where parents attack referees when they think their children have been treated unfairly?

How parents of elite athletes can or should thread the needle between being motivating and supportive without being too demanding has long been a source of fascination. For better or worse, the athletes of parents like Tiger Woods and the Williams sisters are famous (and infamous) for seemingly helping their children achieve greatness through their own time, money, passion, and often, “tough love.”

And while fathers have historically occupied the role of hyper-involved parent/coach, these days, that involvement is typical of the whole family.

“Being an elite athlete takes a huge commitment in terms of time, effort, and sadly, in the U.S., money,” says Travis Dorsch, PhD, associate professor and founding director of the Families in Sport Lab at Utah State University. “Parents are inherently involved from a very young age. Indeed, they are typically the ones who introduce their children to sport and support their journey for as long as it lasts. They serve multiple roles: coach, launderer, nutritionist, chauffeur, psychologist, sleep therapist, and more.”

That has an emotional effect on everyone—parent and child athletes alike.

“They get so invested in it,” says Sharon Kay Stoll, PhD, M.Ed., a professor of sports ethics and education at the University of Idaho who has studied parental involvement in sports. “It becomes this psychological claim on the whole family devoted to the outcome of this child.”

Intimate family involvement has become the norm in recent years thanks to the “professionalization” of children’s sports, as the AAP puts it. If a child shows talent in a sport and wants to pursue it as a competitor, a rec league turns into a club team turns into higher levels of club teams. Performance on competitive teams is meant to garner a college scholarship, and then brand sponsorships, and finally the best indicator of greatness and success of all: an Olympic medal.

In this reality, money is both the carrot and the stick. In pursuit of the kind of athletic success that leads to free rides at college, celebrity status, and endorsements, families travel around the country (or even world) every weekend for competitions, send children to elite training schools, and even move states so their children can train with the best coaches. Stoll says this can all cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Financial investment—in addition to the drive to want to see your child succeed—leads to high emotional stakes.

“When you start investing resources, it is very hard to say ‘I don’t care what the outcome is,’” Stoll says.

Can we really expect parents not to care? It turns out, ‘not caring’ is not necessarily the answer to providing a foundation for mental fitness.

The goal, Livingstone says, is to parent not just the athlete, but the person.

How to help build mental fitness when parenting an elite athlete

As Livingstone felt the waves of her daughter’s post-loss emotion roll through the car, she chose her words carefully. While acknowledging how tough the loss felt, she also said, “I love you, and I love watching you play.”

“The role there is an anchor of love,” Livingstone says. “We’re tethering them to love and home, so they can spread their wings and go try things and fall on their faces and know that okay, I’m still loved, I’m still me. How can I learn from this?”

The goal, Livingstone says, is to parent not just the athlete, but the person.

“If we’re looking at it from a lens of how can we support mental fitness, and not just mental fitness of the athlete, but of the whole human, their wellbeing overall, then there are definitely core foundational guiding principles that we know help cultivate a sense of safety and security that do not pull against elite level performance, but rather help unlock new levels,” Livingstone says.

Examine everyone’s motivations

When Julia Konner, MPH, former Division 1 gymnast and author of Perfect Balance: A Young Athlete’s Guide to the World of Gymnastics, started gymnastics as a kid, she says her parents had no idea what they were getting into. But because she showed talent and was passionate about the sport, they let her pursue it at higher and higher levels. And when she herself wasn’t clear about her motivations after a hard practice or a fight with a coach, they let her explore the answer to the question of whether she really wanted to be doing this.

“When I came to them and said I wanted to quit, they would listen to me, and they would help me process,” Konner says. “But they didn’t have the answers.”

Konner says being able to come to the conclusions herself helped maintain her longevity in the sport, as well as continue having a positive relationship with her parents. However, she had some teammates whose parents would reward them with gifts or prizes when they leveled up. Or they would not allow for conversation about drive, insisting that their kid was “not a quitter.” Konner says teammates would even throw up before meets because of the pressure they experienced from their parents. At that point, Stoll says it’s past time for a parent to look at their own motivations for keeping their kids in elite sports.

“Whenever you focus that much on that, you lose a sense of yourself in relationship to the child,” Stoll says. “You lose yourself within the competitive venue where you see the athlete as an extension of yourself.” Don’t confuse your motivations with the desires of your child.

Dorsch says one way to do this is think about goals—the athlete’s, the parent’s, the organization’s—like the three corners of a triangle.

“It is imperative that parents ask their children regularly what the child’s goals are,” Dorsch says. “Then the parent must align their goals to the child’s, also taking into account what the goals are for the team or organization. All three corners of the triangle must be in alignment.”

Letting athletes blaze the trail is imperative.

“[Parents who say], ‘You take the lead and we’re behind you 100%,’ I think those are the most successful athletes usually,” Konner says. “There are these exceptions, but I think that’s how it’s sustainable.”

Take an active role in sussing out the environment—and then let coaches and athletes have their own relationship

Switching club teams made all the difference for Livingstone when she was a teen swimmer. Unfortunately, because of the high stakes in coaching elite athletes, it’s all too common for competitive teams in particular to pack on the pressure and contribute to burnout and stress. So a place where a parent can intervene is in picking a sports community that aligns with the family’s values.

“You’re letting the kid drive, but doing the work to find the environment that you’re allowing them to go into, and then as they get older you’re pulling back the things that you’re doing for them, and letting them, and encouraging them, to build the skills to do that on their own,” Livingstone says.

Dorsch explains that this is meaningful because it helps athletes develop a sense of agency.

“Athletes want to feel competence,” Dorsch says. “Like they are good, and improving, at their skill or sport. Parents can facilitate that by finding appropriate coaching and opportunities for training and competition.”

An essential aspect of this, says Konner, is letting athletes manage the relationship with their coaches. After a tough practice, if she would complain about her coaches, her parents would encourage her reflect on the situation as a whole and help work out how to communicate with the coaches.

“I really felt heard [by my parents], but also they never took my side,” Konner says. Konner found that “frustrating” at the time, when they asked her questions like “Do you think you were being disrespectful? Do you think you were making a face? Did you roll your eyes?” They encouraged Konner to “reflect on it, and that helps in every situation in my life now.”

“I hear that a lot of ‘I just want my kid to be happy,’ and in that we lose the opportunity to help our kids cultivate mental fitness.” —Samantha Livingstone

Sit with the hard feelings

Unfairness, disappointment, and loss are all parts of life, so parents need to send the message that it is okay to feel these hard things.

“I hear a lot of ‘I just want my kid to be happy,’ and in that we lose the opportunity to help our kids cultivate mental fitness,” Livingstone says. “When they hear ‘I just want you to be happy,’ that is interpreted as ‘Okay, I can’t feel these feelings of not feeling so good. So if I do feel those, I’m going to shove them down. I’m not going to tell you about those because I don’t want to disappoint you.'”

It’s also up to parents to model how to get through sadness and anger as a parent. Doing so can help children develop the skills to build the same. Livingstone acknowledges that this is not easy—she’s been the parent in the stands pounding the glass and yelling at the ref—but it’s also key to building mental fitness.

“The resilience that’s needed to stay in that upper echelon of performance includes not just physical resilience, it’s also that emotional resilience,” Livingstone says. “If we haven’t learned how to feel hard things, and move through hard things, if as parents we do that for them, we’re robbing them of that opportunity to learn.”

Explicitly decouple performance from love

Winning to get parental approval is a well-weathered trope in sports, and for good reason: Kids pick up even unintentional signals that connect performance with love, says Livingstone.

“The parent’s rule is I love you, period, and it is not attached to your performance—and that isn’t just something we can say as a known,” Livingstone says. “We have to be so explicit with that, and then follow through in our actions. Which is not always easy to do, because we’re human.”

For example, it may be tempting to spend a car ride analyzing a game, but this can send the signal that you are focused on outcomes. Instead, focus on providing that baseline understanding of love and support, while exploring what it is the athlete might have learned from the game, or what they would like to achieve.

What’s crucial is “that piece of I love you, period, and you can’t earn more love or lose love based on how you perform.”