Welcome back to Minor Dilemmas, where a member of Defector's Parents Council will answer your questions on surviving family life. Have a question? Email us at minordilemmas@defector.com.
This week, Giri answers a question about how to encourage your child to love your favorite sport.
Natalie:
I am a tennis sicko. I've played my entire life, actively compete in leagues/tournaments, and help coach a local high school varsity boys' team. My dad, who is a phenomenal coach and player, taught me how to play and my favorite memories from growing up are from playing with him. I would be lying if I said that it doesn't matter to me whether or not my one-year-old daughter plays tennis. I really want her to love the sport that I love! But I also don't want to be an insane sports mom. (I'll add that I have no interest in being her coach. My dad is one of the vanishingly rare people who can do the coach/parent thing; I don't know if I can, which tells me I shouldn't.) More than anything, I want her to find something she loves as much as I love tennis. How do I facilitate that?
I have a child the same age as yours, so I can't speak with any wisdom from down the road. But I have spent plenty of time observing and contemplating the Tennis Parent, one of the most curious and often noxious creatures in all of sports. It's good that you've already identified a major error made by many of those people: an insufficient firewall between the "coach" and "parent" roles in a child's life. Parents should offer emotional refuge from the pressures a child experiences, and it's much trickier to serve as such a refuge if you were also the one making them run suicides and drill approach shots all afternoon. I've watched a practice where an adult professional player threw a toddler-style tantrum at his dad. I also think these players can wind up sheltered because they don't learn how to interact and negotiate emotions with other people.
I remember what Jannik Sinner said in his victory speech after winning his first Slam: "I wish that everyone could have my parents, because they always let me choose whatever I wanted to, even when I was younger," he said. "I made also some other sports, and they never put pressure on myself. I wish this freedom is possible for as many young kids as possible."
In the grand scheme of things, this reads as an incredibly banal comment, but against the specific backdrop of nefarious tennis parents, it’s something of a flex. I see a learner's zeal in the way that Sinner has continued to tinker with and refine his game, after committing full-time to tennis at the geriatric age of 13. This isn't a guy who got cornered into playing the sport, and you can tell.
There are plenty of tennis players who do reach the highest level of the sport while being coached by a parent, but—and this is just my read—many of those relationships appear irreparably damaged, so I would not encourage any healthy person to make that tradeoff. Obviously, we're just talking about raising a tennis-loving child, not a child with a WTA ranking, so it might feel like we're getting a little ahead of ourselves. But I do think it's worth being vigilant about it, because even at ordinary levels of competition, tennis is a pressurized, solitary, and psychologically taxing sport, and the parent-child relationship can easily be warped by it. If you're not careful, one day you'll find yourself in the player's box at a pro tournament (woo-hoo!) dodging your child's violent racket swipes (oh no).
In terms of practical steps, I can't see the harm in teaching your daughter the technical foundations of the game, which would give you years of fun together, as you show her how satisfying it is to get a tennis ball to ping cleanly off the strings of a racquet and stay inside the lines of the court. That's an amazing gift to pass along to a child: that feeling of the one perfectly struck forehand out of 500 that justifies the whole trip to the courts, and if you can manage to transmit that joy, you're well on your way to raising a tennis-loving child. But before she enters any kind of serious, structured competition, you might want to outsource the coaching to someone else. That will cost money, but any money that maintains a good relationship with your offspring (while preserving the joy in a shared hobby) is money well-spent.
Recently I spoke at length with parents of a rising, seemingly well-adjusted professional player. The things that struck me most:
- Their ongoing engagement with tennis as a hobby—having favorite players of their own, watching other matches, seeing the entertainment in it.
- The emphasis on the child's academics and well-roundedness, such that tennis was not the single totalizing factor in their family life. In fact, they seemed to care even more that their kids liked school and had non-athletic interests and options in life.
- Their calm demeanor, which is hard to fake, but is something everyone can work toward.
- They didn't force themselves to watch the matches if the pressure was too high; sometimes distance is better for everyone.
Meanwhile, I'm still working with a player who poops her pants. Here's how I've been approaching it so far. We roll and bounce tennis balls; she waves a racket around, and watches me take swings. As far as she knows, our TV is a device that can only display a championship-winning Knicks run (hate to break it to her that this isn't the norm) and professional tennis matches. The sport is known to her as "nenni." I'm trying not to come off as too enthusiastic because I think they can smell that on you. Judging by the letter you sent, you should be very careful about giving off this scent.
Though I love the idea of us playing regularly together, I'm on a waitlist for a nearby tennis club that is several years long, and the reality of scarce court time in NYC means I'll be prioritizing other activities instead. But I'd love for her to know basic technique, and moreover I'd love for her to grasp that day-making "one good forehand" feeling. My working hypothesis is that raising a lifelong, non-burnout tennis enjoyer has more to do with enjoying the minute-by-minute sensory experience of playing than with winning lots of matches. To that end, I will try to model enjoyment that is more process-based than results-based. Wow, look how much fun we had running around, sweating, smacking some forehands and backhands. I hope that this works. I don't know if you read Timothy Gallwey's Inner Game of Tennis, but I'd like to project that approach onto parenting.
The tricky part is that achieving competence in any domain inevitably involves a child being made to do something even when they don't "want" to do it, where "want" means voluntarily selecting it over countless quicker dopamine-release buttons available to them. And the dopamine-release buttons they've got these days are insane. Our inbox already holds a few questions about this puzzle, and I'm curious to see how I'll handle it.
I recall plenty of afternoons where I didn't want to go to various lessons, but as an adult I'm extremely grateful I can still do a spinning hook kick and read music; I wasn't ever pushed hard enough to resent those things, and I know that flow-state pleasure requires a basic foundation of skill that you can't really cheat. I believe in pushing through some amount of a child's stubbornness. But I don't know exactly what the balance is, and the specific dynamic will depend a lot on my child's personality, which has yet to unfurl itself in full. So far she has despised her two swimming lessons, but she's much more comfortable in water now. We're going to our first dance lesson in a few days. Let's see if we make it through the full slate.
