How to Build Patience in Kids Through Youth Sports
*What follows was originally in the manuscript of Away Game: A Christian Parent’s Guide for Navigating Youth Sports. We cut it in the editing process for two reasons. One, we were way over the allotted word count and had to cut out large portions of the book. Two, this chapter puts the focus on us as parents and how we need to change. The other chapters in the book put more focus on our kids.
You’re a young Israelite, no more than eleven or twelve years old. All you know from birth is the life of a slave, watching your parents make bricks for a living and working under the harsh oppression of their Egyptian masters. Before your teenage years, you are part of the exodus from Egypt. Led by Moses, you witness the plagues aimed at Pharoah and his minions, you wake up on passover to a blood smeared front door, you walk on the seafloor as water forms a barricaded wall on both sides, you follow Yahweh as He leads your community caravan with a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, and consume the miraculous provisions of food and water along the journey to the promised land. You experience more pain, joy, panic, hope, and adventure in those few years than most people experience in their lifetime.
But you also have a front row seat to your parents impatience with the process. Desiring to be in the promised land quicker than reality allowed for, they complain to Moses incessantly. You see their consistent doubt of God’s promise whenever they encounter a perceived setback. You see them constantly taking matters into their own hands, trying to bring about their own will in their own timing. And you see God discipline them through their nomadic wandering over the span of four decades as every one of them (except for Caleb and his family) die before they arrive at their destination.
You're now in your early fifties—married with young kids of your own. Free from the communal punishment of your parents and their generation, you move your family toward the land promised to you by God. You’ve eaten the same thing for most of your adult life. Your taste buds long for diversity and you wonder if you will ever make it to your new home. That’s where we pick up the story:
“From Mount Hor they set out by the way to the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom. And the people became impatient on the way. And the people spoke against God and against Moses, ‘Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we loathe this worthless food.’” - Numbers 21:4–5
The people became impatient on the way. It’s what comes natural, and it’s all they’ve ever seen.
Their kids’ impatience prompts a few thoughts with implications for us.
The children, now adults, simply caught and lived the habits of their parents. They’ve been taught that when they’re not seeing the result they want or expect, they should gripe and complain about it—and that’s what they do.
Trials expose the depth of a person’s faith and are the truest indicator of their trust in God. As theologian Matthew Henry suggests, “the lengthening out of a trial discovers the weakness of our faith,” and forty years had certainly drained whatever the Israelites had left.
Impatience resulting in complaining and grumbling is simply the default response of brokenness. Patience in the midst of struggle is a result of spiritual maturity and growth. Patience is an acquired skill, a fruit that needs to be cultivated and grown in our soul. It doesn’t just happen or come about naturally.
As Christ-followers, we are called to embrace and model patience, which reflects not only the true depth of our trust in God, but also our spiritual maturity. It’s a developed virtue scripture holds in high regard.
“Put on then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.” - Colossians 3:12
“Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer.” - Romans 12:12
“Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him; fret not yourself over the one who prospers in his way, over the man who carries out evil devices!” - Psalm 37:7
“Love is patient.” - 1 Corinthians 13:4
Why God’s Patience Matters
Why is patience held in high regard in God’s economy? Why should patience be a mark of his people? Because God himself is patient, and our choice to express patience reflects a trust in who he is.
“But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.” - 2 Peter 3:8-9
“But I received mercy for this reason, that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience as an example to those who were to believe in him for eternal life.” - 1 Timothy 1:16
In cultivating the habit in our own lives, and modeling it to our kids, we are “imaging” our Creator. We are making a conscious effort to look and act like him. And when we align our thoughts and actions with his character, it brings him glory—and it best positions our kids to grow and flex their own “patience muscles'' when the moment calls for it.
You may not recognize the critical value of “patience” in our kids’ lives, but it constantly shows up in significant moments as they become teenagers. Patience is required of our kids when…
- We’re talking to another adult and they barge into the conversation and ask what’s for dinner.
- Every other kid has a cell phone and social media except them
- They struggle in school and want so badly to understand what is being taught, but it’s just not clicking.
- They get behind the wheel of their first car
- They think they're in love and want to push physical boundaries
- They just can’t keep up with their teammates—or their teammates can’t keep up with them.
Patience is indeed a virtue, but again, it’s something that we have to practice. And youth sports is one of the best training grounds for our kids to grow this needed virtue, provided we (the adults) teach it and model it ourselves.
The Impatience Playbook for Youth Sports
The Youth Sports Industrial Complex (YSIC) feeds off our impatience. It encourages an uneasiness in us, playing upon our currently felt desperation for a positive future outcome for our kids. It constantly reminds us that our kids aren’t yet as good as they could be, that they’re falling behind, that they need “more” of something the YSIC offers and they won’t be able to keep up/succeed without it.
The YSIC doesn’t just welcome our anxiety, it expects it, capitalizes on it and exploits it for its own benefit. The system is built to give us a craving for what “successful” looks like and the expectations that come with it, and then keeps feeding it, knowing that what they offer will never fully satisfy, nor will participation with them guarantee turning your kid into the player you want them to be.
Indeed, the in-game atmosphere at most youth sports events testifies to this internalized anxiety by the lack of patience reflected in most of the voices heard by our kids from both the sidelines and the stands. We see, feel it, and often voice it.
Travel sports are laden with performance anxiety and weighty expectations, even if our kids cannot give words to this invisible stress that they feel about it all. Your kid (and you) can actually have a great time with travel and club sports, but not if they feel a low key stress that they are not measuring up to the version of themselves they think you want them to be. And it’s not just you. They’re absorbing other parents’ stress toward their teammates, too.
Join us on a fall day at a youth soccer game. It doesn’t matter where. It doesn’t matter what gender or what age group or what skill level. The youth soccer experience produces the same in-game soundtrack all across the country. Even the first 20 seconds of this video describe a normal Saturday morning at the fields…
You hear the same words being screamed, volleyed back and forth between male and female voices:
“C’MON! PASS! GO! RUN! SHOOT! GET IT! GO! KICK IT! PASS! NO! FASTER! LET’S GO!”
I’ve done it. You’ve done it. We’re just “cheering” for our kids and the team, but those cheers carry the urgency and exasperation we all feel when current performance doesn’t match our expectation. When what we’re seeing in real-time falls short of what we imagine it should look like in our heads. When we sometimes feel embarrassed for our kids, embarrassed for ourselves as parents, and afraid they’ll never get it the way we want them to.
Why does any of this matter?
It matters because if we try to talk about the importance of patience in some other setting, our kids will remember our demanding screams/pleas from the game and they’ll think, “Hmmm. I hear and understand what you’re saying about patience, but during games I feel what I think you really believe. And it doesn’t sound anything like what I imagine patience to sound like.” They may not be able to connect the dots and articulate their tension this cleanly, but from our years of interacting with athletes at all levels, know this—they will feel the disconnect.
Own the discipleship, don’t outsource it
If we want our kids to value patience and practice it in their own lives, we can’t outsource their training to the Youth Sports Industrial Complex (YSIC). Patience starts with us. We must lead the way. But what we say and what we do must be in alignment. We can teach patience until we are blue in the face, but like most character traits, this one is better caught than taught.
To win in the area of patience, we need a growing awareness of where we may actually be modeling impatience to our kids.
Here are a few worth bringing into the film room for further review. Behind all of these is often an imagined, not-yet-realized future we’re allowing to create an impatient stress in the present.
Constant correction whenever we see room for improvement
Usually done with the best of intentions, when we see a gap in our kids’ performance that can be fixed by a simple correction, we share it. Many of us shout it out during the game, then quickly repeat it all as soon as they come to us after the game, then for good measure, hit them with it on the car ride home! The problem here is not just the “what” but the “when” and “how” that model impatience to our kids. When we sound exasperated—or become immediately exasperated when they don’t warm up to our input in the moment—they hear unsatisfied impatience more than helpful correction. The right advice given the wrong way and at the wrong time will usually be experienced the wrong way, especially in the context of the game they’re trying to play right now.
Here’s a helpful tip that may prove impossible to implement: Try watching a game in complete silence and just take inventory of what other parents are saying and shouting throughout the game.
The point isn’t to judge others, but simply to see and hear the chaos that surrounds your kid each game and to become more aware of your contribution to it.
Rush to specialize in one sport
I feel the pull inside me as a parent of a kid who is above average at sports. I’m trying to keep the voice inside my head from becoming audible words to my son.
“If you just practiced a little more with this sport you could be great.”
“What if you just focused on wrestling this year instead of basketball?”
“Look at your size? Do you really think you have a future playing football?”
“You’ve got a chance to be really special at this.”
The YSIC encourages sport specialization as soon as you’re willing to sign up for it, even though plenty of studies and anecdotal evidence suggests allowing your athlete to experience sport diversity is better for them in the long run. We say “allow” because most kids want to play multiple sports. It’s often the parents who push to specialize, not the kids. Again, this is impatience on our part because we think if they don’t start specializing now, they will never “make it.” But sport diversity helps them develop different muscles, reduces the risk of overusing sport-specific muscles, and diffuses the wear and tear of burn out. If your young athlete really wants to focus on just one sport that’s one thing, but let’s make sure our impatience with their process doesn’t lead us to take over the process altogether.
Assume prepubescent athletic trajectory will continue
“If this group sticks together, they’re really going to be something.” That’s what one of the parents said following my youngest son Judah’s flag football game. Judah just turned nine. To their credit, they annihilated every team they played. Nobody scored a point on them. One team got a first down because Judah’s coaches backed off when the score was 42-0 late in the fourth quarter. Could they be special if they stuck together? Sure. But not because they are currently a buzzsaw on the 8-9 year-old flag football circuit. We’ve both got examples of this kind of talk in every youth sport we’ve been around.
We wrongly assume that our (and other’s) kids’ athletic trajectory on a line graph is always up and to the right at the same angle it’s at now. We see other kids the same age as ours, who seem so far advanced in their skill level at age 12 that it feels hopeless for our kids. How are they ever going to make it when they’re already so far behind everyone else? Or if our kid is the one who can make layups while other 9-year-olds can’t hold the ball without dropping it, we immediately feel pressure to place her with more “elite” players and opportunities because she’s obviously on the path toward stardom in this sport. It’s easy to overreact on either end of the sport development spectrum.
We really need patience.
Patience to realize that puberty changes things. Muscle development varies widely, and the ability to move whatever body they wind up with comes more from God than a particular club option. A willingness to practice and train on their own becomes more important in high school and it can’t be conjured—it either exists or it doesn’t.
The point is that athletic development is almost never linear.
The best athletes in 4th and 5th grade are not always on the varsity team in high school, and many kids who seemed like scrubs as 13-year-olds wind up state ranked a few years later. The 6’2” twelve year old will be scary to face on the mound, and he’ll get every rebound come winter. But in another few years he may not have gotten a bit bigger or better, and suddenly everyone else has not only caught up in their body, but passed him because they had a hunger to get better and he really never had much interest in working to improve.
Your kid isn’t doomed to the bench because they can’t dribble with their left hand right after they learn how to walk. And a beautiful swing in tee-ball doesn’t predict you’ll hit the curve ball later.
Enlist private coaches, elite and club team experiences, and high end apparel/equipment to “keep up” or “get an edge”
If our kids are driving the process of wanting these opportunities that require a greater financial and time investment on our end, that’s one thing. It’s also possible that higher end club options are the only thing available.
But if we are scheduling our kids next season without involving them in the process, we may be acting impatiently, forcing our young athletes into opportunities that they only agree to because they know it makes us happy. It’s challenging to value patience as a family when we are constantly on the move to the next practice or game with little margin to breathe in between.
It’s worth noting that sometimes the young athlete chooses that path for themselves. I was at the track having a conversation with a dad whose daughter is one of the top field event specialists in the state. For the last year, she has dedicated multiple hours each day to this event, driving almost an hour both ways to a private coach—and the results have been amazing. As he explained it, “I advised against it. I told her there are other options available to her. But she told me ‘Dad, this is my happy place. I really do love doing this.’”
Private coaching is not the problem. If we’re going to sign our young athletes up, however, just make sure the private coaching bus is driven by the kids, not fear-driven adults.
Expect our kids to play to the potential (or the sport) we project onto them
How many of us map out the strategic plan to see them accomplish our goal for their lives? My wife and I ran track and cross country for D1 schools. Our oldest son is in middle school and participated in track this year. He chose the hurdles and the high jump because they “sounded fun.” I cringed.
What I wanted to say was this: “Um…you know it’s in your DNA to dominate the distance events right? Trust me, you will love the feeling of winning and leaving kids in the dust more than tripping over hurdles.”
But I didn’t.
And the truth is, I knew that I would love the feeling of watching him win and leave kids in the dust, whether he did or not! I’m trying to practice patience because I know what’s best for him is not to dominate other middle schoolers in the mile if he doesn’t want to do it. What’s best for him is to enjoy what he is doing so he comes back the next year and does it again. Who knows, maybe next year he’ll run long-distance and do what he was born to do (kidding, kind of)?
Compare our kids, good or bad, to other young athletes around them—and around the world
We know that there is always someone faster, stronger, smarter, and more athletic than our kids. But as social media continues to permeate every corner of the globe, we realize how big the gap is between “the best” and “the rest.” Comparison has always taken place locally. But now we participate in the comparison game nationally and globally. As we scroll, we see Jason’s kid is going to nationals in swimming, and Sarah’s daughter just ran the top time in the state, and the Jones family is traveling to Pennsylvania for the Little League World Series. None of these people live in our community, but we know them through friends, and their existence is a constant reminder of how far our kid has to go.
The more connected we are within the global online community of our specific sports, the more we see the separation. And it becomes easy to up the ante in an endless game of chase—assuming that the only option to close the talent gap is to invest more time, money, and energy into our kid, even if they don’t really want it.
As former college athletes and parents of athletes, we get it. It’s tough to preach patience to ourselves when we feel like the lead pack in our kids’ sport continues to leave the rest in the dust.
Hostile words directed at coaches or officials
We’ve already talked about our in-game behavior and words directed at our kids, but we need to be careful what we’re yelling in the direction of coaches and officials, too. Our kids pick up on all of it, and they hear our voices even in the midst of many shouting at the same time.
Parents, there may be a situation that requires you to speak up from the stands, but if it doesn’t involve the physical safety of your child, it’s probably wise to zip it!
Most drama happening at a youth sporting event traces its origin to the moment parents start chirping, which only encourages more to join in, eventually tipping over into crowd chaos. If I can’t keep my mouth shut, at least part of my problem is a lack of patience—fueled by a lack of self-control. Research shows that one of the main factors behind the youth mental-health crisis involves parents who refuse to let their kids work through challenging situations on their own.
Yes, our kids need us to practice both patience and control during a game for modeling purposes, but they also need it so they can enjoy playing the game.
Why patience from us produces a better outcome for them
Parents, studies consistently show that the “all-in” approach is more likely to contribute to your kid quitting than it is to making them an elite athlete. Ironically, the chances are higher that our impatience will cause them to walk away from something they used to love rather than cause them to “make it”—however we define that.
Wisdom encourages us to calm ourselves down and make a choice to enjoy this stage instead of being impulsively driven to close the gap between what we see on the field vs. what we want in our minds.
Parents, it’s ok. They’ll get there.
Or maybe they won’t, and that will be ok, too.
But let wherever they wind up be because they lead the process. Resist the urge to aggressively grab the wheel from them or force them to go on a ride they don’t want to be on. Too many of us set goals for our kids, instead of shepherding our kids to set goals for themselves. We can have hopes for them, but we need to let them lead in this area.
In an article titled “How to Raise a Champion—Chill Out,” author and performance coach, Steve Magness, says, “If you look at the research on prodigies and phenoms who eventually become standout adult performers, a deep intrinsic drive is a requirement.”
I’m living proof of what Magness is saying. I grew up playing every sport imaginable and assumed my future was playing basketball. In the fall of my freshman year of high school, I got cut from three sports. I was devastated. In the fall of my sophomore year I started running cross country for the first time. Three years later, after miles and miles and miles of training, I was one of the best runners in the state and ran on scholarship at Wake Forest University. The point is not that I am amazing at running. It’s that I had a deep seeded motivation to be good and a God-given gift of endurance. And that drove me to put in the work necessary to reach my goals.
In sports, this is often called the “It Factor.” There has yet to be a proven training regime, curriculum, or coaching model that creates “It” in a young athlete. Elite athletic success comes from intrinsic motivation that can’t be forced on by parents or coaches or money or travel teams.
Parents, if your kid is going to be good or even great at something, it won’t be primarily because of your constant cajoling of them. Indeed, studies show that your constant pressure might actually ruin their ability to enjoy the game so much that they quit before their own motivational drive kicks in. If they’re going to be exceptional, they’ll figure it out.
A final plea for parents: Enjoy it while you still can
In talking with parents whose kid’s athletic careers are over, a frequently heard regret is tied to the impatience they felt. They wish they could go back and just enjoy watching their kid play, and realize that often stress about an imagined future kept them from enjoying the present. They didn’t fully experience the pleasure of being in the moment with them as they played. They were too worried about what “wasn’t” or “what could be” instead of being content to watch and take pleasure in what was right in front of them now.
When we feel it brewing inside ourselves, we really can diffuse the anxiety that comes from worrying about the future by employing gratitude for what IS instead of dissatisfaction for what is not yet—and may never be. When you recognize yourself feeling pressure, invite God into it. Release these projected futures to God and let Him be in control of it all. Ask him to help you be fully present and to not be worried about an imagined athletic future muddying your ability to enjoy the present. Remind yourself that nothing about tomorrow is guaranteed (James “life is a mist”) so choose to enjoy what’s happening in front of you today.
Ask for patience. If our kids are going to grow in it, they need to first see it, hear it, and feel it from us.
As you lead the way in this through the vehicle of sport, hopefully your young athlete will begin to model what you preach—and practice.
