034: Are you a Voodoo Parent?

In this episode we are going to look at a less desirable aspect of modern day sport, one that is growing and unfortunately in some cases, defining an athlete's career.

And that is the Voodoo parent.

These are the small minority of parents on the sideline, who take it on themselves to battle with the athletes, the other parents, take it out on the coach and officials, and who are willing to continue the feuds on the sideline and online.

Over the years there have been many initiatives to curb this growing aspect of sport, however little has been done to understand its longterm impact on the athlete.

Today we are going to talk about just that –⁠ the impact on the athlete.

So listen in as we open up the can on this touchy subject!

Are you a Voodoo Parent?

Episode Transcript

Brain in the Game | Sport Mind Coaching Podcast
Dave Diggle
Episode Thirty-Four – Are You a Voodoo Parent?

Hello and welcome back to Brain in The Game. Brain in The Game is a podcast that has been specifically designed for athletes, coaches, and their parents looking to do their sport just a little bit smarter. Brain in The Game is a podcast and I’m your host, Dave Diggle. In this, episode 34, we’re going to look at something called “Voodoo Parenting” and it’s the role that the parents play in the emotional stability of the athlete.
Now, right from the offset, I put my hand up and say I’m a parent of three kids involved in sport. So I get to see the voodoo parenting process from many different angles, both as a parent, as a coach, and as a participant. So today, we’re going to unpack what we do as parents and now we can do that smarter.
So what is the role of a parent? We’ve spoken in the past about the role as a coach, who’s a technical adviser, who gives the athlete the information they need at that specific time to give them the outcome to perform. We’ve spoken about the role of the athlete, which is to take on board all the right information and to perform to be able to do what they do the best way they can. And we’ve crossed over in some degree what the role of the parent is for a competing athlete. The role of a parent is to create the emotional stability for that athlete outside of their training, outside of their competition. So to give them that balance, to give them that normality in their everyday life. Give them that opportunity for the brain to recharge and regenerate and rejuvenate. So all the expenditure they’ve done in the gym mentally, emotionally, and physically, they can regenerate when they become the normal person on the outside when they’re not the athlete. So the parent’s role is critical. It’s also the person who travels around with them, who ferries them from training to the physiotherapist, to sports and conditioning coaches, and to their competitions. So the parent’s role is a critical role not only from logistics but from the mental and emotional management of the athlete.
So the role of a parent is also the importance of managing relationships – because if we think about it from a parent’s perspective, and as I said that out from the start, I’ve got three kids involved in sport, not only am I trying to create the right environment for my children to learn and to flourish in what they’re doing to thrive as athletes, I want to make sure they’ve got the right relationship, the most productive relationship between them and their coach, but also the sport-specific specialists that go along with that, the people around them, their environment, their entourage, making sure that they can get the most out of them to get to where they want to get to. And it’s also about their peers, how they get on with their peers.
Now, 99.9 percent of the population of elite athletes do not have the ability to have their own training venue, to train on their own, have their own coaches, have their own entourage team around them and gives them that isolation from anybody else that they’re competing with. Most of us train with the people we compete with. So, managing those relationships going, from one day being a teammate to the next day being competitors, is a tough gig for anybody. And as a parent, part of our role is to teach our children, the athlete, how to best manage that.
Now, let’s be honest. Some parents out there don’t do this particularly well and this is where the voodoo parenting comes in. Some sports have been tarnished by the sideline antics of some parents. So if we look at the dance studios, the ice rinks, the gymnastics venues, the football pitches, the athletic tracks, to name a few, they’re now “no parent” zones. This means that the parents have been isolated away from where their children are going to become these elite athletes. This shifts the interactivity by the parent. No longer do they know what’s going on. They feel isolated. I know I do. When I go to my daughter’s gymnastics venue, I walk in there and there’s a big glass wall that means that parents are not allowed outside. There are signs everywhere telling us we’re not welcome.
Now, I’ve got an elite background in gymnastics and I know what it’s like from a coach’s perspective to be standing there and having parents try to interact with their children, trying to get their kid’s attention, trying to hand them sweets and lollies and biscuits and snacks. So I get that perspective to it. But I believe most of the reason why parents have been isolated from the venue is not because of those small little inconsistencies or the things that make their coaches’ hairs on the back of their head and neck stand up. It’s because parents don’t know their boundaries. I can stand there and watch some of these parents in other venues when I’m coaching, when I’m doing mental training with these elite athletes and it’s cringeworthy when the parent is trying to do something to get the attention of the kid or interact, or even coach them when they don’t know what they’re doing. So the parent’s role needs to be better defined. We’ve talked about this topic in another podcast and what we didn’t necessarily highlight as well as we probably should have done was a parent needs to understand the boundary. They need to know what their specific role is and how to do that the best to enable their child to achieve.
So the parent’s role is specifically for the emotional management of their child, to give them the most stable platform to perform from, to make decisions from, to be able to have clarity of thought and not have distractions from feuds going on from peer issues where some peers are picking on the other peer or there’s bullying going on or favorites are being played, all this kind of things that go on inside the dynamics of a sporting venue. And we know they go on. We see them all the time. They don’t need to be fed by us, parents. What we need to do as parents is set an example. Lead by example. How do we interact with those other parents? With the peer’s parents? With the other coaches? With the way that we interact with the coach and get information? Because that interactivity by the parent does tend to equal some more resentment.
As a parent, I get to stand and I see some of these other parents getting frustrated because they cannot see what’s going on. They have no idea they hand over their most valuable position at the start of the session and somebody takes them off and then sends them back two or three hours later and you have no idea what they’ve done, what they’ve achieved. We just get told, “Pay at reception, pick up at the end.” That’s a hard place to be as a parent. When we have that resentment, when we don’t have that interactivity, it encourages emotional disharmony. As a parent, we become tense, we become, as I say, we feel like we’ve been isolated, we’re on the outer, we don’t necessarily know what’s going on, we have no control over our children, that we get told, you’ve got to look after these things, you’ve got to do the best for them, you’ve got to give them the right environment. How can you do that?
What happens then is we become emotional and we know that our kids, especially up to their early teens, are emotional processors. So we might think we’re hiding it from them, we might think that they don’t see it. They feel it. They sense it. And when they come out of their training venue and where we’ve got steam coming out of our ears or we’re asking the million and two questions and going, “What happened to you? What did they do to you? What did you achieve today? What was that? What happened to you? What can I do to improve that? How can I get involved?” They come out, these athletes come out with, whoa, that’s a bit much. I’m getting bombarded after just being in there and being pushed to the boundaries and pushed over the limits. I come out here and all I want is a bit of understanding, some dinner and go home and go to bed, and I’m getting bombarded by these emotional thing in front of me called my parent. When we do this, when we do this as parents, what we’re doing is sending the wrong emotional message to our athletes, to our children.

What message do we want to send to them? We need to have that open communication. We want them to be able to come out and go, “Hey, this happened today. What do you think?” If they come out and we’re going, “Urrrr, what’s going on? What did you do? What did I miss?” They’re not likely to open up to us. They’re not likely to say, “Well, this is a great place to go and get information. These are stable people.” They’re coming out and thinking, “Whoa, these are non-stable people. I’ll go somewhere else and ask questions.” So they tend to go after their peers or they’re going to ask their coach and get that one-dimensional view, which is not the right place for the athlete to get all the knowledge they need. A coach will not have the best emotional outcome from that athlete. They won’t be able to give them the most stable, because their role is technical information, to give the right information at the right time, the right technical advice, not to manage the athlete’s emotions. They can’t do both jobs as efficiently as specifying “my role is this, your role is that.” So the coach’s role becomes compromised because the athlete can’t go to their parent because there is emotional mess.
The other thing I get to see frequently is the parent on the sideline taking on the battles of the athlete. Like I said before, not many athletes have a gym to themselves. They don’t have a venue, the coach, and a team around them just for them. They have to share. So sometimes peer-to-peer competitors who are training in the same venue end up at loggerheads. Sometimes they’ll go from being best mates one day to wanting to rip each other’s hair out the next day because they’re competitors. They’re trying to gain leverage on each other. And the older they get, the more catchy that becomes, the more specific that becomes, the more painful that becomes.
So you see these parents on the sideline taking on the battles of the kids and they’re almost fighting on the sidelines. I’ve seen parents throw things at each other. I’ve seen parents go out and smear campaign other parents, talk about personal things, private life, just to get the edge on that parent. Now, in battle, that’s all well and good. But in our children’s lives, in these competitors’ lives, all that’s doing, the only people that are suffering are the athletes –because after the competition, these two have got to train together again. Yet, when they walk out, it’s like World War III. You’ve got parents throwing things at each other. They’re out there arguing and pitching against each other. They are trying to get coaches’ attention. They are trying to favourite other coaches. I’ve seen parents give gifts to some coaches in an attempt to get them to favour their child. That’s not sending the right message to these athletes. That’s not giving them a stable emotional platform to do their best from. We are teaching them that it’s okay to go and nobble the person next to you, to go and try and get the coach’s attention to get one-upmanship on the next person.
That’s not going to help them. That’s not going to give them the right place to perform from. What caused on that athlete is that environment giving them. It’s an unstable performance platform, poor self-esteem and often isolation – because I’ve seen athletes get isolated by the rest of the team because of what the parents are doing on the sideline. Treated differently, ostracized, kicked out of the team because of what’s going on. More often than not, athletes take great distance from, just like travel great distance to their training venue in carpool, especially here in Australia, and I know in the US, when I lecture in the US, kids can get in the car and drive one, two, sometimes more hours from leaving school to starting their training and they carpool. So if one parent is there pitching about another parent, then these kids hear that and they wear that. And then the only place that those kids can take it out on is each other in training venue. So it’s creating an environment that’s isolating our own children. We’re counteracting what we’re trying to achieve in the first place, which is giving them the best performance platform.
So we’ve created this subculture of parents who are trying to take on the row of fighting the battle to gaining that evidence of my kid needs to be better than your kid. This is what I’m prepared to do. There’s the feuds between parents, the, all these things that go on peripherally around the training venue is doing several things that’s detrimental to the athlete. They’re creating an environment where that’s carrying over into the training and those peers are fighting amongst themselves, carrying on their parents’ feuds. It’s isolating the coach from the parents. It’s not building a bridge so these parents and these coaches can have a commonality in how they manage the athlete – is the coach going, “whoa, you guys keep that on the outside. I’m not getting involved.” And the distance, the void becomes between the two of them. It’s teaching their parents that what we’re trying to do here is gain some kind of control. Because we’ve got no control inside the gym, inside the training venue, so we have to have some kind of control out here.
And the last thing it’s doing for coaches is they’re feeling more and more isolated too. They can’t go to the parents and say, “Right. I’m having a problem with Johnny or Jane here and what I need you guys to do at home is this, this, this, and this.” Because they know that the minute they turn around and say there’s another issue inside the training venue, these parents are going to turn around and go, “I didn’t know that was going on. I’ve been paying you X amount of dollars for the last six months to get my Johnny or my Jane right to where I need them to be and why didn’t I know this was going on?” It’s not worth it from a coach’s perspective. So everybody, instead of being this pyramid of support for the athlete to achieve what they want to achieve, it becomes this deck of cards, this house of cards that’s going to fall down at the first opportunity, the first gasp of wind.
So as parents, what are you trying to achieve? What is it that you want to get out of your child’s career? Do you want to teach them that it’s a dog eat dog world? Or do you want to teach them how to better communicate? How to ask specific questions? How to be supportive? How to be able to turn on to become the athlete going and enjoy their training and come out and feel normal? Because let’s be honest here. What’s the things that you remember most about your childhood? It’s the real highs and real lows. So how do we create the highs so that our kids have a positive most productive time in their sport? Because we don’t want them to tarnish their career with all the lows.
So parents, take on board what I’ve tried to say to you today and that is think about what you’re doing. Think about the consequences of the way that you behave, the way that the lessons you’re trying to insti in your children is being demonstrated. If you’re not getting on with the person next to you, how would you want your child to deal with that? Would you want them to talk? Would you want to try and sort out their differences? Or you want them to start throwing stuff at each other? Because when our children learn from us and they start behaving like us, then we get to see it, and it’s often too late. Think about how you interact with their coach. Think about how you interact with your peers. Think about how supportive you are for your athlete and how you encourage that along to other athletes. Because remember, they’ve all got to train together. One day a week, they get to compete. The other six, they’ve got to be working together.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this different perspective on how us parents can influence our athlete’s outcomes. And as always, I’ll put the transcript from this episode on to our website, which is www.braininthegame.com.au or go directly to our main website, which is www.smartmind.com.au, where you’ll find all our lectures, our clinics, our face-to-face trainings, and some videos. And so, until the next episode. Train smart and enjoy the ride. My name is Dave Diggle and I’m the mind coach.

034: Are you a Voodoo Parent?

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