Think you're helping your child excel in sports? You may want to think again

The moment of recognition hit Tony Snethen when he was driving his then- 11-year-old son, Bryson, home from a youth game.

Snethen was one of those dads who liked to use that ride to tell his son what he could have done better on the field.

This time, though, when he looked into the back seat, he noticed something was different. Bryson had been sitting on the passenger side on the way to the game; on the way home, he was seated on the other side.

“Why are you behind me?” Snethen asked.

“It's easier for you to not make eye contact with me through the mirror,” Bryson replied.

Snethen, a suburban father of two sons who play baseball in metropolitan Kansas City, was floored.

“I broke down,” he tells USA TODAY Sports. “Even though he was joking about it, there was a point that he had and he nailed it. It crushed me. I was like, ‘I've got to change.’

“Not to say that I was overly aggressive, but I found myself saying things and being harder on my kids than I was on the other kids that I was coaching. And it strained our relationships.”

If you’re a sports parent, you’ve probably tried to have these conversations right after games, too. But have you ever asked your kid whether he or she wants to have them?

It’s a question Snethen, the vice president of brand innovation for the Kansas City Royals, and the other executive producers posed to young athletes for a 2023 documentary called “Not Good Enough.”

The responses they received reverberate throughout the 45-minute film, and through the minds of the kids' parents, who are forced to hear what they say.

It’s not just the yelling and screaming at events that hurts, the kids say. The constant correcting and feeling that they have to do better also can chip away at their psyches, and, as Snethen learned, can even lead to suicidal thoughts.

“It carries over into life,” Snethen says, “then it comes to performance anxiety for tests, or hanging out with friends and doing and saying the right thing; it just starts to snowball and creates a monster.”

USA TODAY Sports spoke with Snethen, a driving force behind “Not Good Enough,” and two mental health professionals about the harm we can inflict on our kids through their sports.

(Questions and responses are edited for length and clarity.)

'Self-doubt creeps in': We're trying to help, but some are making matters worse

Snethen and the film crew took these kids’ open letters to their parents, got them blown up into giant structures and planted them at the exits of sports complexes around Kansas City.

The idea was to elicit a visceral response from passers-by: Was that letter written about me?

USA TODAY: This documentary sort of was done through the inspiration of your own story. But is it based on other true stories as well?

Tony Snethen: Oh, yeah. No matter what ballfield or ballpark you go to, you pass parents and they're having these conversations and being so hard on their kids. We installed the letters and we had a long lens set up trying to capture people walking by them. And we captured a father just destroying his kid in the car. We all agreed that if he gets physical that we would step in and do something. It was so sad, but unfortunately it was so common. They literally walked past the letter and he just berated his child in the car, windows down, to where everyone could hear it. It was awful. It was 20 minutes. You could tell the kid just wanted to get out of the car. And it was just hopeless. I mean, just dropping F-bombs, telling him about putting his phone down, and paying attention to what he was saying. The kid’s never gonna forget that moment. I guarantee you.

USAT: What have you learned about the long-term effects of doing something like this to your child?

TS: Well, we started doing research and really digging in and seeing that 70 percent of kids were quitting by 13. Some people say, well, the competition has gotten so much tougher, and if you’re not playing one sport 365 a year, you're gonna fall behind. That’s not the reason kids are dropping out. It's because of the perfectionism that has (been) instilled in them, and inability to reach that perfection. And so, self-doubt creeps in; it creeps in outside of the sport itself and starts to creep into their livelihood. And there's a really dangerous repercussion there.

Coach Steve: How to talk to your kid after a bad game. Hint: Don’t be like Andre Agassi’s dad.

How parental pressure can lead to kids committing suicide

The Royals, through an association with Blue Cross Blue Shield Kansas City, already had a mental health awareness program when Snethen arrived in 2021 after 20 years in the creative advertising world.

While seeing how players and broadcasters open up about mental health challenges, Snethen focused on how some of these issues started in the pressure cooker of youth sports.

He found himself sitting in front of a boy who spoke openly about the pressure he felt from his friends, parents and coach while playing sports and how it led to suicidal thoughts.

USA TODAY: Were you able to connect the athletic-related suicide rates to parental pressure?

TS: Yeah. The kid we ended up putting in the film, he was so open and honest about trying to kill himself. And luckily, he didn't succeed. But we wanted to put that one in the film because of his ability and desire to want to talk about it. We interviewed, I would say, 70-plus parents, and we did interview (a) couple that had lost their son to suicide, and the dad put 100% of the blame on himself. They didn't end up being in the documentary but he says every day that he wakes up, he knows he is the reason and the pressure that he put on his child to be something that he couldn't be when he was a kid.

USAT: And there was actually more than one kid you interviewed who had contemplated suicide?

TS: That's their way of escape. The kids that we talked to, they just said that the world that they live in now with social media only compounds the problem. They go home after a game and they see Billy's parents posting pictures of the game and Billy went 3-for-5 and had two home runs. And he looks on his parents’ Facebook page and sees nothing and that just compounds it. It's like, "So do they not love me or do they think that I played terrible? Billy's parents seem to love him and they talk about him and all the good thing(s) that he's doing. Can’t it be like that for me?”

Nobody goes into parenting to harm their kids; there is still time to correct yourself

According to the National Alliance for Mental Illness, the second-leading cause of death for children aged 10-14 is suicide.

Laurel Williams, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, told USA TODAY Sports the people most likely to die by suicide are young men.

“I think we've done young men a disservice by telling them that they’re not supposed to have  emotions,” she says. “So they don't know how to deal with their emotions. And particularly if they're in a high-powered sport, or their only identity is the sport and they get an injury or something bad happens, and they have a moment of despair, they unfortunately, are more likely to impulsively act on a suicidal thought.”

A coach, Luke Town, speaks openly in "Not Good Enough" about a kid he coached who felt stress to succeed from his father. When an incident led to the boy getting suspended from his high school basketball team, his girlfriend dumped him. The boy committed suicide.

“I’m part of the problem,” Town says in the documentary. “A kid’s over there hanging his head, I’m like, ‘Hey, don’t hang your head.’ What a stupid thing to say. The kid feels bad. I don’t need to point out he made a mistake. He knows it. He’s gonna beat himself up way worse than anything I can say. My job later on, as I learned, is I gotta lift him up.”

Coach Steve: How John Wooden won by emphasizing effort over outcome

USA TODAY: There's a message here: Is it too late? Can you still correct yourself as a parent or coach?

TS: You can still have a high school son or daughter playing sports and it can be corrected. They need to know that you love them regardless of outcome. Because I don't think any parent goes into any of these situations going, 'My intent is to mentally fracture my son or daughter.' Nobody goes in there to hurt their kids.

I think if they have the right resources, and it's all about timing. It’s seeing piece(s) of content like the film we created at the right time for the right parent. Universally do I think it'll be as correctible? No. I think there's still some (who) have the inability to let the kids be kids.

The way we look at it is the more people that see this, the more people that it can affect, and it just creates that ripple effect.

Acknowledge your problem but realize it will take work to resolve it

The first step in fixing a problem can be acknowledging that you’re part it.

“I think owning it is the first thing and labeling it,” says Ryan Maid, a psychologist and the Royals’ senior director of behavioral science. “I think human beings overall are resilient (and) I think children, pre-adolescents and adolescents, are resilient. Once we start to label, and have some ownership, that maybe we made a mistake, that is good modeling for our children.”

Throughout “Not Good Enough,” we see parents coming to grips, sometimes tearfully, with what they have done. Shawn Barber, who spent 10 years in the NFL (1998-2007) as a linebacker, is one of them.

He was the dad, he says, standing right behind the batting cage, the constant voice in his son’s head. That voice, he admits, burnt his son out of baseball.

“That was not the goal,” Barber says. “I wanted him to think I was there for him.”

You’re being there for your kid when you show him or her you’re not perfect.

While it’s healthy to allow our kids to fail and succeed on their own terms, it’s crucial to our relationship with them that we do it, too.

“Seeing that guy on the sidelines, I don't know when he changed, but he is the epitome of what you would want any parent coach to be now: positivity and support,” Snethen says of Barber. “I mean, there's not a greater representation of change.”

But not everyone changes overnight. One of the main characters in the documentary, a demonstrably over-the-top sports dad (played by an actor) who relentlessly rides his 10-year-old son during a baseball game, eventually finds himself knocking on his son’s locked door.

There is a message in that image for all sports parents about not only the depth of our actions, but what it might take to reverse them.

USA TODAY: I guess it's sort of left open-ended what happens to the kid at the end?

TS: We wanted to leave that as a, “What do you think is happening here?” Horrible thoughts creep in: 'Is this kid gonna kill himself?’ But we wanted it to be a time of reflection that this dad is realizing, through his son's actions, hearing what his wife is saying, that he has a lot of work to do. That it's not finished. We felt like if we went back out on the field and he was just cheering in the stands, that's not reality. It doesn't happen overnight.

Steve Borelli, aka Coach Steve, has been an editor and writer with USA TODAY since 1999. He spent 10 years coaching his two sons’ baseball and basketball teams. He and his wife, Colleen, are now sports parents for a high schooler and middle schooler. His column is posted weekly. For his past columns, click here.

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