Boosting the Mental Toughness of Young, Anxious Athletes

“What kids need is more structure (by adults),” a youth athletic coach keeps telling me.

Wrong!!

With all due respect, coach, what kids need is less structure from adults, according to compelling research data illuminating what’s happening with today’s youth. Observation tells the same story.

According to Jonathon Haidt, Ph.D. in his book, The Anxious Generation (2024), the over-structuring of kids by parents, teachers, and coaches is a leading factor in an ever-growing epidemic of debilitating anxiety and dysfunction cutting across a wide swath of young people.

Social media and smartphones are also major factors identified by Haidt that contribute to the emotional difficulties of today’s youth. (The sociological and psychological toxicity inflicted by our culture’s obsession with screens and social media will be explored in a future piece.)

Here, we examine the negative mental health impact on kids of adult over-structure through a youth athletics lens.

Before diving into the sports aspect of things, we’ll take a brief detour into the emotional plight of today’s youth.

Mental Health Research Discoveries

Here are a few numbers to ponder concerning the mental health crisis facing kids. All data reflects what’s happened since 2010, according to research cited by Haidt (2024).

There’s been a 145 percent increase in reported major depression for girls in the United States and a 161 percent increase for boys. Girls have a higher overall frequency of this disorder.

Amongst U.S. college students of all genders, there’s been a 134 percent increase in reported anxiety and a 106 percent increase in reported depression.

Suicide rates have skyrocketed for young adolescents (ages 10-14) in the U.S., increasing 91 percent for boys and 167 percent for girls.

Similar alarming data appears for kids worldwide.

What Eyes and Ears Tell

Simple observation of young people in sports and otherwise reveals a telling story of their distress.

Never in my 50+ years of coaching and 37 years of clinical and sport psychology professional practice have I seen so many young people struggling with anxiety and an inability to handle the simplest of everyday challenges, on and off the athletic field.

Examples include teenagers freaking out when the Wi-Fi goes down or receiving a disappointing score on an academic test. Young athletes crying, throwing fits of rage, lashing out at teammates, or withdrawing into a fetal position when something goes wrong.

Such things were not bothersome for most young people prior to 5-10 years ago, from my longitudinal vantage point, stretching back to the 1960s.

This behavior showcases poor self-control and sportsmanship as well as disrupting optimal sports performance, general functioning, and—most importantly— their emotional well-being.

It’s as if the fate of civilization hinged perilously on their athletic performance.

The Demise of Youth Independence

Older readers may recall young people having much more freedom prior to the 1990s. Before then, the “liberation age,” as Haidt calls it, was somewhere between the ages of 8 to 14. As he elaborates:

“Children used to have a great deal of freedom to walk to school, roam around their neighborhoods, invent games, get into conflicts and resolve those conflicts”—independent of adults— “beginning around first or second grade.”

Back in the day, young people would organize, practice, and play sports without adults lording over them. Weekend and summer days were filled with adult-less, away-from-home experiences, learning to structure their lives, fend for themselves, and be independent.

“Antifragility”

A term introduced by Nassim Taleb in his book Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (2012).

Children need to build the capacity (antifragility) to deal with conflicts, difficulties, and other life challenges without getting thrown into a state of emotional turmoil, disruptive to effective living.

“Psychological flexibility” is a similar term embraced by practitioners of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), the theoretical approach of a growing contingent of psychology professionals.

Allowing young people to do things on their own without adult “structure” and supervision gives them the training necessary to develop the antifragility to effectively take on life’s punches.

Unfortunately, we’ve deprived kids of that experience, creating a generation of young people with the resilience of a butterfly wing, resulting in emotional struggles.

This is not a dismissal of adult structure in the form of rules, expectations, and discipline necessary for raising children. What’s examined, herein, is over-structure by parents and coaches that undermines antifragility.

Sports Parents' Contributions to Youth Fragility

Here are a few examples of growth-hindering behaviors by parents in the youth sports world and some quick remedies.

• Forbidding kids to play on their own with peers away from home. Permit them to go!
• Parents inserting themselves into their kids’ sport, by caddying for their young golfers, and other intrusive meddling during games, practices, and playground activity. Allow them to fend for themselves!
• Hockey dads putting on and removing the skates of kids old enough to do it themselves, then packing up equipment bags and carrying the bags to the car while the kids play on their phones. Let athletes do those chores!
• Parents intrusively inserting themselves into their child’s affairs by calling the coach to resolve problems, intervening during practices with instructional inquiries to instructors, or answering for kids when they are questioned by the instructor. Please let kids learn to communicate with authority figures!

Parental over-structure and involvement sets up anxiety-producing circumstances for kids, totally flummoxed by having to do things on their own when mom and dad aren’t around and when older and on their own.

Coach Contributions to Kid Fragility

Let’s begin with coaches enabling the above behavior. Please enforce appropriate parental boundaries!

Another example is sports programs requiring kids to room with their families on out-of-town trips, thus promoting dependence on parents to wake them up, exercise personal hygiene, and be ready on time. All that depriving the young athlete the experience of being independent.

They’ll flounder with anxiety when they’re away from their parents, lacking the experience to do things for themselves.

There are youth sports personnel communicating practice and game scheduling information with parents, depriving kids’ opportunities to learn to schedule, organize, and remember for themselves. Back in the day, that information was delivered to the athlete—only—and somehow kids as young as eight managed things perfectly fine.

Give kids a chance to have organizational experience!

Building Antifragility

While those examples of adult over-structure are well-intended, such actions interfere with kids’ sense of self-sufficiency, and can result in anxiety when kids are on their own.

Parents, coaches, and other involved adults need to allow opportunities for kids to independently manage their lives and develop the mental toughness required of life’s everyday tasks and challenges.

Not being able to do for themselves with little things can induce crippling mental turmoil as children face the inevitable troubles that life delivers.

Sending them off on their own, post-high school and beyond, will be especially difficult. Ask college employees about the stress observed of students away from their coddled home life.

Stop coddling, parents and coaches, and enable young people to achieve resilience by allowing them to learn how to structure their own lives.

Let go and let them!