18/09/2026
The Most Powerful Thing a Parent Can Say From the Sideline
“I love watching you play.”
It might not sound particularly powerful. It doesn’t correct a defensive mistake, identify the open player or remind an athlete to box out. It won’t change the scoreboard.
But when it comes to the long-term development of young athletes, the role parents play from the sideline can matter enormously.
Parents invest a great deal in junior sport. There are early mornings, late nights, registration fees, uniforms, travel, volunteering and countless hours spent sitting in stadiums. We care about our children, we want them to succeed, and when we can see something happening on the court it can be incredibly difficult not to call out advice.
“Move the ball!”
“Get back on defence!”
“Drive!”
“Shoot!”
“Pass!”
Usually, it comes from a good place.
But good intentions don’t necessarily produce good outcomes.
And increasingly, research into the experiences of young athletes is telling us something important: children need their parents involved in their sport — but they don’t necessarily need their parents to be another coach.
When a player has two coaches
During a game, young athletes are already processing an enormous amount of information. They are reading teammates and opponents, remembering team structures, responding to their coach, making tactical decisions and regulating their emotions — often while physically fatigued and under pressure.
Now imagine simultaneously trying to process instructions coming from the sideline.
The coach says slow down.
Dad calls, “Go!”
The player sees an opportunity to drive.
Mum calls, “Pass!”
The athlete is no longer simply playing basketball. They are trying to decide whose instruction to follow.
And that is where one of the unintended consequences of sideline coaching emerges: we can take decision-making away from the athlete.
Player development isn’t simply about learning the correct decision. It is about developing the capacity to make decisions independently.
Young athletes need opportunities to scan the court, recognise patterns, make choices, get some of those choices wrong and adjust the next time.
Mistakes aren’t evidence that learning has failed.
Very often, mistakes are how learning happens.
What does the research tell us?
A 2024 systematic review brought together 29 studies involving 9,185 young athletes and 2,191 parents. Researchers identified several parental approaches associated with positive motivation in young athletes: supporting their autonomy, maintaining positive parent-child relationships, moderate rather than excessive involvement, positive values and creating a climate focused on learning and improvement.
That distinction is important.
The evidence isn’t telling parents to become less interested in their child’s sport.
It is telling us to think carefully about how we are involved.
There is a significant difference between supporting an athlete and attempting to control their sporting experience.
Young athletes need involved parents. They don’t need another coach.
Sometimes the wrong decision is exactly what a player needs
Imagine a player receives the ball and misses an open teammate.
A parent sees it immediately.
“PASS!”
The instruction may be technically correct.
But developmentally, silence may have been more valuable.
Perhaps the player drives, turns the ball over and recognises a second later that the pass was available. Perhaps the coach asks them what they saw. Perhaps the same situation occurs five minutes later and this time they make the pass.
That is learning.
The goal of junior sport shouldn’t be to create athletes who can successfully follow instructions shouted by adults.
It should be to develop athletes who can perceive, think, decide, adapt and problem-solve for themselves.
Every time we immediately provide the solution, we potentially remove an opportunity for the athlete to find it.
Eventually, there won’t be a parent sitting behind them telling them what to do.
We should be preparing them for that moment.
Your behaviour in the stands matters too
Children don’t only hear our words.
They watch us.
They notice the frustrated shake of the head after a missed shot.
They see the hands thrown in the air after a turnover.
They hear criticism of referees.
They notice the conversation about playing time.
They hear the criticism of coaches and teammates on the drive home.
And there is Australian evidence suggesting that what young athletes see from their parents on the sideline is related to how they themselves behave during competition.
A study involving 67 Australian young athletes participating in team sports asked athletes about both their parents’ sideline behaviour and their own behaviour during sport. Positive parental sideline behaviour was associated with more prosocial behaviour from athletes, while negative parental behaviour was associated with more antisocial behaviour. The researchers described the findings as preliminary evidence and recommended sporting organisations encourage positive parental behaviour while working to reduce negative behaviour.
In other words, our children aren’t only listening to what we shout from the sideline.
They’re watching how we behave there.
Support and performance are not opposites
Sometimes parents worry that stepping back means lowering expectations.
It doesn’t.
Support isn’t the absence of standards, accountability or ambition.
Research involving competitive junior tennis players found that athletes reporting greater parental support also reported greater enjoyment of their sport. Parental support was also associated with an objective measure of performance and with how important athletes considered their sport to be.
That matters.
Being a supportive sporting parent does not mean asking less of an athlete.
It means allowing more of the learning to belong to them.
The emotional sideline matters
Young athletes don’t experience our involvement only as information. They experience it emotionally.
When every possession is accompanied by an instruction, every mistake produces a visible reaction and every game is followed by an analysis, sport can gradually begin to feel less like something the child owns and more like something they perform for adult approval.
And ownership matters.
The large systematic review of youth-sport research found that autonomy-supportive parenting, positive parent-child relationships and moderate parental involvement were among the approaches associated with positive athlete motivation.
If we want young people to remain in sport, therefore, we should care deeply about the environment surrounding them — not only the quality of their coaching.
Retention is development too.
A junior sporting program hasn’t necessarily succeeded if it produces highly skilled young athletes who no longer enjoy the game enough to keep playing.
Encouragement is not the same as coaching
None of this means parents should sit emotionless in the stands.
Quite the opposite.
Young athletes need enthusiastic parents.
Cheer effort.
Celebrate great teamwork.
Applaud both teams.
Encourage resilience when things aren’t going well.
Be the person in the stadium whose support isn’t dependent on how many points your child scores, whether they start, how many minutes they play or whether their team wins.
There is an important distinction between encouragement and instruction.
“Great effort!”
“Keep going!”
“Great teamwork!”
“You’ve got this!”
Those messages provide emotional support without telling an athlete what decision to make.
Compare that with:
“Shoot!”
“Pass!”
“Drive!”
“Stay on your player!”
“Get into the key!”
Those are coaching instructions.
The difference might seem small from the stands.
For the athlete trying to process the game, it can be enormous.
Let coaches coach, players play and parents parent
Perhaps the healthiest junior sporting environments are those in which everyone understands their role.
The coach provides instruction.
The athlete thinks, makes decisions and plays.
The parent provides unconditional support.
That doesn’t mean parents don’t have valuable sporting knowledge. Many parents have coached or played at high levels themselves.
It means recognising that during competition, another adult has been entrusted with the coaching role.
It also means allowing children to develop their own relationship with their coach.
If an athlete doesn’t understand something, encourage them to ask.
If they’re unhappy with their role, help them develop the confidence to have that conversation.
If they make a mistake, give them space to reflect on it before supplying the answer.
Those skills — communication, self-advocacy, resilience, reflection, problem-solving and personal responsibility — are part of athlete development too.
And then there is the car ride home
For many young athletes, some of the most important moments of the sporting week may happen after the game.
Parents understandably want to talk about what happened.
Sometimes children don’t.
They probably already know they missed those free throws.
They know they turned the ball over.
They know they didn’t play particularly well.
Their coach may already have spoken to them about it.
What they may need from their parent isn’t another coach.
They may simply need Mum or Dad.
Ask them what they thought of the game.
Or wait until they bring it up.
Tell them you enjoyed watching them play.
Then ask what they want for dinner.
There will be plenty of opportunities for learning.
Childhood sport doesn’t need to become a continuous performance review.
What do we actually want from junior sport?
Of course we want young athletes to improve.
But surely we want something bigger than that.
We want children who love being active.
Young people who are resilient when things don’t go their way.
Athletes who can think under pressure, solve problems and respond to feedback.
Teammates who communicate, cooperate and care about one another.
Young people who take responsibility for their own development.
And perhaps most importantly, we want them to still want to play next season.
Winning matters.
Competition matters.
Skill development matters.
But so do enjoyment, belonging, confidence and the desire to keep coming back.
Parents have enormous influence over whether sport becomes a place where a young person feels constantly evaluated or a place where they feel supported to learn.
So next time you’re sitting courtside and you can clearly see the pass your child should make, try something surprisingly difficult.
Don’t tell them.
Let them see it.
Let them miss it.
Let them work it out.
Let their coach coach them.
And when the final siren sounds — whether they’ve scored twenty points or none, whether they’ve played brilliantly or had a shocker, whether they’ve won or lost — make sure they know that none of it changes the person waiting for them in the stands.
Sometimes the most valuable contribution we can make to the development of a young athlete isn’t another instruction.
It’s simply being their parent.
