Kids First Co-Parenting with Dr. Royster
The podcast for moms raising secure kids after divorce & separation, even when their ex makes everything harder.
Kids First Co-Parenting with Dr. Royster
Balancing Act: Youth Sports in Divided Families (Bonus Interview with Dr. Alec Baker)
What happens when the already intense world of competitive youth sports collides with the complexities of co-parenting after divorce? Dr. Alec Baker, a psychologist specializing in both sports psychology and family dynamics, joins Dr. Royster to explore this challenging intersection where parental dreams, financial pressures, and children's wellbeing often compete for priority.
Drawing from his background as a former competitive athlete whose career was cut short by injuries, Dr. Baker offers a compassionate perspective on why youth sports environments can become pressure cookers for family stress. His doctoral research revealed a concerning connection – as the percentage of family income devoted to youth sports increases, marital satisfaction (particularly for women) tends to decrease. When divorce enters the picture, these financial and scheduling strains often intensify, creating new battlegrounds for already conflicted co-parents.
The conversation challenges several pervasive myths about youth athletic development. Contrary to the fear-driven narrative that children must specialize early or "miss their chance," Dr. Baker explains why multi-sport participation and physical literacy development until ages 12-14 creates stronger, more resilient athletes. This evidence-based approach not only benefits children's athletic trajectory but can significantly reduce family stress by decreasing financial and time commitments during those early years.
Most valuable for divorced parents are the practical strategies shared for supporting young athletes without adding pressure. Dr. Baker distinguishes between beneficial support (which enhances pe
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Welcome to the Kids First Co-Parenting Podcast, the podcast for smart, intentional, millennial moms raising resilient kids after separation and divorce. I'm Dr Carolyn Royster, a child psychologist coach and a mom. After thousands of therapy hours with kids caught in the middle of high conflict households, I'm here to help moms like you do it differently From peaceful co-parenting to total chaos. I've got you here. We talk boundaries, regulation and how to raise a great kid, even if your ex is beyond difficult. We blend science with real life and, as always, keep the focus where it matters on raising great kids. This is Kids First Co-Parenting. Welcome to the Kids First Co-Parenting podcast. I'm very excited because on this episode, I have my friend and colleague, dr Alec Baker.
Speaker 1:Dr Alec Baker is a psychologist who brings deep expertise in sports and family issues. He works extensively with youth athletes, helping them strengthen focus, manage performance, anxiety and build resilience both on and off the field. He also specializes in divorce and co-parenting support, offering therapy for adults and adolescents navigating separations and divorce, as well as specialized co-parenting coaching to help parents develop cooperative, business-like relationships that put kids first. In addition to his clinical work, dr Baker is the executive director of the Co-Parenting Cooperative of Colorado, colorado's first provider of co-parent education, serving more than 100,000 parents since 1993. Their mission is to equip parents living apart with the tools they need to reduce conflict and support children in adjusting and thriving. I'm so excited to have you, dr Baker. We have a lot of overlap in our work. So excited to have you, dr Baker. We have a lot of overlap in our work. We're really hoping today to talk and blend your specialty of youth in sports and the divorce co-parenting world so welcome.
Speaker 2:Hello, thank you very much for having me. I'm excited to talk today. This is the topic that's closest to my heart.
Speaker 1:I'd love to hear about how you became interested in this area, because I think all of your specialties are such unique specialties.
Speaker 2:I grew up playing sports and particularly ice hockey and lacrosse were my main sports, but I played everything that there was out there, so soccer to tennis, you know multi-sport, summer camp kinds of things, and by the time I was in high school I was playing national level ice hockey and on varsity lacrosse team for my high school and really fully devoted and involved as an athlete, that was very much who I was and sports were one of the greatest things that ever happened to me. But I lost my sports career to overuse injuries in my hips from playing ice hockey as a goalie. When you watch the abs or in my case the Flyers now being in Philadelphia and you see the goalie on the ice with his feet out to the side, that does a lot to your hips, I could see. Unfortunately, that led to some injuries which there was no real surgical correction for until after I was already in college and so I missed my window. But you know I played with guys that made it to the AHL, the minor league hockey, and you know, played Division One and was very much on that track. And so, you know, after college I was kind of like, what do I do with this lifetime of experience and it brought me to coaching and so I started doing a lot of coaching and this was following along the track of wanting to become a psychologist. And when I went to the University of Denver where I earned my PsyD, they were starting a sports psychology master's program and in that program my goal was to blend in sport and performance, to hopefully become a coach with mental performance, mental skills background and for a variety of different reasons it didn't really play out that way. Mostly, a doctorate in clinical psychology doesn't really allow you to do those extra things that the sport would require.
Speaker 2:But I was involved in sports throughout and I had some really difficult coaching experiences where the communities that I was working in really showed some dysfunction and didn't mesh well with the 27 year old version of me, and man's were just impossible to live up to and I really found myself wondering, like what makes parents act the way that they do in the youth sports environment? So go on to YouTube and, just you know, search youth sports parent and you're going to get countless videos of people behaving poorly, and I was directly targeted in some of those sorts of scenarios. I don't mean to cast aspersions. Actually I wanted to take a compassionate view to understand what is it that's making people do this, and what I came down to was really looking at, listen.
Speaker 2:The participation in youth sports is insanely investment heavy when it comes to time and money. Youth sports is asking so much and I noticed it just anecdotally that we were seeing some really toxic interactions between parents and kids and it made me think that, while you sports has this really pro social benefit, the way the system is structured could be really creating counterproductive end results. Right, so we may be getting some social emotional benefit, but if we're tearing families apart, we're adding in the risks social emotional risks of divorce which are well known. We've got to figure something out there. That was the basis of it, and I started working with a youth lacrosse organization and got back into coaching and doing some community-based intervention to talk about creating a unified team concept where parents were actually a part of it, and what I started to really come to is like, as much as nobody tells us how to be parents when the kids are born, nobody's really telling us how to be a sports parent and how to be involved in a part of a team concept.
Speaker 2:I've developed programming where we really spell that out and talk about the ways that youth sports performance and mental fitness actually go hand in hand, and when we focus on them together, they lift each other up. But if we consider them as separate things, they start to pull each other down. The basic idea being this goes into my clinical practice that when we focus on mental skills for just general mental fitness these are the same sorts of skills that we talk about in sports psychology for focus, management and high performance we reduce the stress coming out of sport. We improve mental fitness. When we improve mental fitness, we make it easier for athletes to remove the roadblocks between them and peak performance. That's the way I would kind of describe that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, wow, I mean there's so much. I have so many questions and there's so much there. It's interesting because where I grew up there really it was like you played rec sports. You played for the school, and when I started my clinical practice out here in Denver and started hearing about club sports and travel teams and the investment, just the sheer amount of money and then time and travel and the intensity of that, and then having kids in my office where I'm like, do you even like this anymore? Like, is it bringing you joy? And many of them it is.
Speaker 1:And I see a lot of parents trying to support that joy and that spark because they love the sport and so why not go all in? And then, of course, you mentioned this briefly and I'm sure we'll get into it, but my mind goes to how do two parent families navigate this? How do you both support your kid when you're traveling and paying all this money? And what if someone can't afford it? And there's so many layers to it. What I wanted to ask was this idea that you have around how to be a good sports parent, and how do you teach that? Because as a parent myself, I could really see how should I push. Should I be supportive, no matter what, like what's the right way to go about this? Can you talk a little more about that?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So the key thing to be discerning is the difference between support and pressure Pressure. Some people will say pressure makes diamonds. I think that we all kind of come from a legacy of the Bobby Knights of the world, bobby Knight being still that sense that, like old school coaching, where we're just hard as nails, is the way that you get top performance, and there's infinite levels of evidence that that's not really true and all you really do, in comparison to other models of coaching, is increase the amount of trauma that comes from sport participation. It doesn't traumatize everybody, but it traumatizes a significant minority and makes it so that they aren't doing it because they love it.
Speaker 2:And there's a key barrier to optimal performance If we're experiencing pressure, we're not letting ourselves go and get into the moment and hit the flow state that really takes us through and that is the rewarding physical and psychological experience of participation. If kids are always sitting there thinking my parents are going to be upset if I don't score a goal, or my parents are going to be upset if I let in too many goals as a goalie, that is going to be something that's going to distract them from just how do I actually put my foot to the ball or how do I keep my stick in the right position or how do I keep my eye on the pocket? So here's the thing that the youth sports environment is asking so much from parents at such a young age. A $3,500 registration fee for eight-year-olds is starting to become difficult Bananas. I know that's crazy for eight-year-olds is starting to become difficult Bananas. I know that's crazy, right? So I'm going to say that there's plenty of people out there. They may be putting more money into their kids' participation in the sport than their retirement or their savings, and what that starts to do is put pressure on the situation for the sport participation to return on the investment, and it takes it away from the investment is towards a return of positive emotional development and turns it into some economic benefit. Or I need my kids to succeed financially in order to support me because I'm putting all of my retirement money into their sports, and so that is kind of a key mechanic of how we see people really running too hot and overpressuring the situation.
Speaker 2:This has a main component of parents feeling like well, if they don't do that, their kids are going to miss out. That is a fallacy. That is a just straight up, bold, underlined italic fallacy you can absolutely start sports late and still grow into an excellent athlete. I could give you five examples off the top of my head. For me, I didn't start playing on a team until I was 11. And by the time I was 16, I was playing in national tournaments, and this was a specialized position I was playing. Another key example here if we look at the Little League World Series, baseball is one of these highly over-professionalized youth sports I'll have to watch that Right right.
Speaker 1:You're just like what these kids are like 10. What is happening here?
Speaker 2:Right, they play in World 12. And how many former participants in the Little League World Series do you think have gone on to play in major leagues?
Speaker 1:I mean, I think they, being someone who's not in sports, I would say like all of them, like this is what they're doing with their lives. But the psychologist in me is like absolutely not. Some of them must crumple under that kind of pressure because your identity isn't formed yet. How do you pick a path in life that early, you know? Tell me, tell me how many.
Speaker 2:Even more concrete than that. So the answer to the question is it's. There's fewer than one per year that ends up going into professional sports and actually are going into professional baseball, and it's something like 250 to 300 have gone into professional athlete careers. So you're actually seeing those kids become pros in other sports at at least as high a rate, but it's on the order of like a millionth of a percent. It is extremely small odds. And so here's the thing this isn't, this is biological, because what happens is those kids turn 13 and they go through puberty and it etch-a-sketches the playing field, it drops them down and those kids that are so used to being dominant oftentimes have to go and see other kids catch up and they don't know how to play and grind and play a game where they're not just easily pushing past people. There's some models that talk about the importance of being able to be dominant, but you know, the point being that puberty is the great equalizer.
Speaker 1:Yes, it is.
Speaker 2:And this is even more so for girls, right, when that happens, so many physical changes happen that the athlete has to learn to reuse their body Right. By that point, people will think that the sports specific skill is what they need to have acquired. And in reality and this goes to the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee's guidance on the American development models they are invested in they're not talking about participation trophies. They want the best athletes possible available for global competition, and what they are talking about is that the early phases for kids that are 12 and below is learning how to learn a sport, building physical literacy.
Speaker 2:What we see is this kind of financial pressure, this pressure to not lose out and, I think, a standard anxiety about failing as a parent, generating that system.
Speaker 2:That is kind of being preyed upon by people who are more than willing to charge high fees and go with the idea that if you don't start young, you're going to miss out and you're going to fail your kids, which is a total fallacy. But the point is that the pressure in this situation pushes people into a space of fight or flight and it strains their ability to be good parents, and so this is how I see it as a risk factor for divorce in the first place. But then let's think about what it's like to be co-parents, where you may not be super friendly and easy to negotiate with your co-parent and you've got to deal with a $3,500 a year fee for whatever sport it is, and maybe it's two or three sports. You've just gone through a financially traumatic event, which is divorce, and you're trying to figure this out and you know it. All it does is add a layer of stress to that scenario, not to mention having to show up to the sideline and stand next to that person.
Speaker 1:Well, let's take a short break and when we come back I want to hear a little bit more about the risk factors around divorce and how. You know you and I share such a similarity with working with some high conflict, higher conflict I know everybody doesn't love that term but just difficult dynamics right in this competitive sports world. So we'll come back in just a moment. Dr Baker, you were mentioning to me the risk factor of these high competitive sports on divorce. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? Has it been studied? Because I think intuitively it makes sense to me that it could be a risk factor.
Speaker 2:My doctoral research was kind of trying to flesh this out.
Speaker 1:So, interesting.
Speaker 2:And so what we, what we kind of looked at, was as a proportion of household income and a proportion of available time, is there a relationship between the amount of time and money spent and marital satisfaction? And for a variety of reasons, mostly scientific, we looked at men and women separately and what we found was that for women, but not men, there is a negative correlation. So the higher percentage of family income spent, the lower satisfaction in the marriage was.
Speaker 2:And that was for women but not men. The real take home there is that, yes, financial overinvestment can be a risk factor. I haven't seen anybody look at it in exactly that way, but Travis Dortch out of Utah State University does a lot of adjacent work and looking at the way that parents are participating and the finances really impact parent participation in sport mostly looking at the ways it motivates parents to be bad actors, I think it stands to reason very flatly that if we know that stress over money and time together are key factors in divorce in the first place, and we know that sport participation stresses both of those factors, it kind of goes without saying.
Speaker 2:A hypothesis that I came up with was either you have people who are stuck in a bad relationship and they're disengaged and that's just kind of it was going to happen anyway, or you see a scenario where people use it to really come together and they are effective at approaching it and being deliberate. You see people who either are struggling in their marriage and they're escaping to their kids' activities, or their marriage was okay but they're getting pulled apart by their kids' participation. They're sliding into this scenario where, all of a sudden, whatever disagreements over money were there, it gets completely blown up by the fact that all of a sudden we have all these bills to pay and maybe we weren't talking about it before or, you know, we didn't have a great routine or tradition around how we do holidays or how we do dates to maintain our connection, and then we all of a sudden don't have Friday and Saturday nights anymore because we're on the road.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and we don't have the finances for it either, right? It reminds me a lot of how we think about a new baby being introduced to a family unit. The child itself doesn't cause I mean, children are stressful, but if there's cracks already in the marriage, they're going to widen, or you're going to navigate a way to figure it out and come closer, like it's kind of goes one of two ways, right? How do you see families post-divorce managing this?
Speaker 2:A lot of the moms I work with I just can't imagine these conversations going very well, not from their part, just because it's so, so difficult and judges do not want to be weighing in on whether or not your kid plays competitive baseball you know, like they don't care, they don't you know, I'm a major advocate for decision makers and actually where decision makers one of their primary role is to decide which sports we're participating in each season, because there's disagreements over how much we're doing, what investment should be there.
Speaker 2:But I also think there's gender differences in sport and I looked at this in my research too. But there's a generational component going on where, you know, 15 years ago when I was doing this research, women's sports had not necessarily caught up in a way where moms had a lot of experience with sports growing up. We were looking at a generation where Title IX hadn't really had the effect of generating youth girl sports and so much easier in a divorce setting to say dad is trying to live vicariously and bring up you know the next Peyton Manning. When it's not the kid's desire, that lack of benefit of the doubt, that lack of seeing good intention in your co-parent creates this way, where it distorts the conversation and when we have to make yes and no decisions and we have to think about how much are we investing, it really muddies the water about who this is for.
Speaker 1:There's so much perceptions around the other person's intentions in these dynamics that I think it would be really easy to let your kids get lost in it and really easy to not know or to almost try to punish one another. Right, he just really wants him in football and therefore I'm going to say no about it, right? Or he just is pushing our kid to do this sport and I don't think our kid really wants to do it, and now we're in this really stuck place. Or the other thing I hear a lot is I'm fine with it, but I can't afford it. It's great, you know. Or, to your earlier point, I love that she does gymnastics. I don't know that she has to be on the $4,000 a year team. We disagree on the level of support. How do you help families with that?
Speaker 2:In our level one co-parenting class for the co-parenting cooperative we have a role play about parents disagreeing over participating in football.
Speaker 2:I never really put that together, but it's certainly fit and that was written, you know, a couple of decades ago, right? We've been doing that same basic idea for a long time. So what do we do about that? I think this is where alternative dispute resolution is really important. You know, we have to recognize that there's a grief and loss process going on. Early on, when we're still in anger or depression or bargaining, we may be prone to some kind of cognitive fallacies. We may be thinking in a distorted way where we really have a hard time giving our co-parent the benefit of the doubt.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right, and so when that's in that space, you know it's much easier and this is really what I was trying to say it's much easier to say oh, he just is trying to live out his dreams, and there's countless Instagram memes about that sort of thing, without divorce in the picture. I think you add the financial stress, you add the relational stress and it's just. You know it doesn't have to be sports, it could be almost anything else. It happens the same way, but sports are pretty ubiquitous.
Speaker 1:And I think the piece that you had talked about earlier too is really key here of remembering that very likely this parent who's pushing for that high level is coming from a place of wanting to do right by their kid, is not wanting them to be left out, is thinking like, wow, they have some real talent and I want to pour everything we can into it. It's just that they may not know some of the pieces you were talking about, that that might actually be counterproductive. Or, truthfully, you don't need to do that high, high level to have a great career in a sport later. I've experienced that myself as a mom, feeling you know they're signed up for whatever sport it is and we go there and there's the kids doing the team and the kids doing the travel team and you're like wait, what are we? Why aren't we doing that? The truth is like the bank account and the schedule Right, we really try. You know my partner and I really try to prioritize free time and down there a little. Still Right, they have time to specialize later.
Speaker 2:You know I have a seven and a four-year-old and we're trying to really live it out where our focus really. It follows the guidance of the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee, which is focused on physical literacy and dabbling in as many different sports as possible. We're doing intramural soccer, we're doing gymnastics, which is the basis of physical literacy, knowing how to do things that actually come out in other sports.
Speaker 1:When you reference physical literacy, can you tell me what that is?
Speaker 2:Right, so that in case folks might not know. Right, that's like being able to tumble, that's being able to fall down, get up. That's being able to run, jump, kick, move your body, all those essential things. Those are the building blocks of any specific sport skill.
Speaker 1:When should people start? Or consider, like gosh, they really love baseball. Now I'm going to. Now it's OK to kind of go more into baseball. I think it's that middle high school age.
Speaker 2:It's really on that cusp of like 12 to 14.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Right when you yeah, and I want to be clear. I'm not saying like, don't be on a team or don't be on a travel team before then. I'm saying you need to be a multi-sport athlete. Until that point, you should not be doing a team that's all year round. That doesn't give you the opportunity to do other sports and focus on other things. And there's a difficult part of being a parent here, which is that I know from being a kid that if I'm really into something I'm going to be like I want to do it all the time, and as a parent sometimes we need to actually hold our kids back from doing things that aren't healthy.
Speaker 2:Overspecialization can be kind of this strange collusion between parent and child where we don't say our standard is you really need to do at least two sports when you get to the end of middle school and the start of high school is when you're really training to compete and that's where you should be getting into the phase of like all.
Speaker 2:Right now we are going for competitive level participation and this is where, like you're, doing a lot of travel has a performance benefit. Right, and getting into those phases before then, a focus on skill training and physical literacy is really where you want to go. What that would mean is, for the younger kids, like eight and below, you're really focusing on basic running, jumping, those physical literacy things. Eight to 12, you're looking more at your specific sports skills. I know how to actually kick a soccer ball in multiple different ways and I know the difference between a pass and a shot. I know basic positioning on the field and those things. And it's not that you can't go further than that. It's that those should be benchmarks where you're really trying to go as a parent and really knowing that the majority of the blooming for a youth athlete is going to happen between 14 and 18.
Speaker 1:Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Speaker 2:And so you want to keep the soil rich. You want to let that happen. You're keeping your resources in your. As a colleague of mine used to love to say, keep your powder dry until you really need it. So I would say save your money and put it in when it's ready to be actually useful, when the kids are, you know, 13, 14. If you are overdoing it young, you're straining yourself and your kids for no particular benefit. But I really want to connect with the idea that as parents, we struggle with this sense of how do we put our kids first without sacrificing ourselves, and I see that as like a really difficult judgment call, and we talk about this in our co-parenting classes. It's just like on the airplane you have to put your mask on first and you have to know when you are tapped, when you are strained and you're not necessarily feeling OK. And showing kids that there's a benefit to being adult by enjoying your life, yeah, like our needs are important too.
Speaker 1:Right. And it's funny that airplane I know that metaphor, they teach it all the time and literally every time I'm on an airplane I'm like hell. The first thing I would do is put it on my kid and, despite them, like drilling it into you for years and years. And yet the intention behind it is something I talk about all the time, right.
Speaker 2:Right. Bring in the divorce context and all of a sudden you've got competition over who's more concerned about the well-being.
Speaker 1:Who's going to put the mask on first? And you're fighting over it.
Speaker 2:Yeah Right, and that's very unhealthy and it makes it so the kids actually feel their parents tapping each other out in competition and they're put in an even worse situation because there's more pressure.
Speaker 1:The idea that kids are thriving or are in an environment, in these high competition, high intensity sports, that they are the point of the triangle. It parallels directly to co-parenting in some cases. How do you help kids navigate those very similar environments the pressure that we were talking about too?
Speaker 2:you know, one of the things that I focus on is if kids are coming to me in a divorce or separation context, I see them much more as a symptom of a system problem. Mostly, I'm focusing on supporting them and helping them just take care of themselves and focus on what's in front of them, which is, you know, school and sports and friends, and I'm really trying to send the message to parents of like, hey, what's the general issue that's causing stress in the system? I, I had a, I had a family once where it was a youth athlete and you know, I was kind of like hey, like we need to get the adults in the situation in order before we're going to have any effect on these clinical symptoms, right? Like the clinical symptoms are an extension of the family dysfunction, right? I actually have a question I wanted to ask you. This came up I've taught family therapy at University of Denver for a number of years. But how do you define family?
Speaker 1:I would say close, reciprocal, healthy relationships. They're not always healthy, but I'd like them to be healthy.
Speaker 2:But I don't believe family is just blood either Right, neither do I, and I think my students educated me away from the textbook for that, and that's its own topic. But what I evolved over time is very much an extension of what you were saying. Is very much an extension of what you were saying, but a group of individuals with caretaking relationships who are working to meet the needs of each individual.
Speaker 1:Yeah, very reciprocal. Yeah, I think the reciprocal piece is what was standing out to me when you were asking me that it's like there's give and take.
Speaker 2:Right, right. Parents don't get their needs met ever. It's not a healthy system. I think this is where the judgment piece comes in and it says, like, parents need to find ways to meet their own needs and it's a part of a healthy family systems. Any book that you pick up, whether it's you know Gottman or Bill Doherty, they're going to talk about the ways that, like, modern society is pulling at the structures of the family that allow parents and kids to get their needs met in a congruent way. Right?
Speaker 1:Or a reciprocal way.
Speaker 2:This is where the arms race of youth sports starts pulling away at parents being able to do something that they enjoy, or it takes the resources of time and money where you know they don't get to go for a run or they don't get to, you know, do the basic things.
Speaker 1:Or you're putting it on your kids to meet your needs instead of your partner Right, or if you are in a co-parenting situation, you can't have that need met.
Speaker 2:Right, Right. So the next time you look at YouTube and you see a parent acting badly on the sidelines, I want you to ask yourself what's going on in their life that's making them so stressed out right now and to try and reframe that as a response to stress.
Speaker 1:I think we're probably both pretty big fans of Bill Eddy's work on high conflict people and he talks a lot about how you know that's not a diagnosis, that's a personality pattern and high conflict people are high conflict wherever they go. That's the pattern and you can find them. Yes, certain professions maybe have a slightly higher instance, but I'm curious your thoughts. I feel like if someone is high conflict in their marriage and their divorce, the chances that they're high conflict with someone like a coach would be pretty high. Do you think there's a higher incidence of high conflict folks in these elite youth sports?
Speaker 2:Does it track that I don't have any research evidence.
Speaker 1:Yeah, of course, of course.
Speaker 2:I also think look at rates of narcissism and high yes, yeah, I hate to label people with that. But I also think it's important to differentiate narcissism and not just say that it's all malignant, that there is a compensatory narcissism. There is a person who is so vulnerable underneath of it all that they're trying to compensate by pumping up and looking good on the outside yeah, and that that can be damaging, let's say. But I think it's not all. I disregard the rights of other people and think that I am strictly better.
Speaker 1:They're very wounded people Right.
Speaker 2:And so having my having my excellent athlete kid is naturally going to be a glow, because it takes so much of your time. It starts to organize your personality around it.
Speaker 1:It's ripe for conflict, right. It's ripe for kids to have. It's ripe for kids to have a lot of issues from it, too, right. I think a lot about being that kid on the field who's afraid one of your parents is going to lose their shit on the sidelines.
Speaker 2:Right, absolutely. And what does that do to you?
Speaker 1:And to your earlier point, it really takes the flow state out of it.
Speaker 2:Right and I want to come back to the compassionate view is that that parent doesn't understand what they need to be doing or what they can be doing to support rather than pressure. They probably don't even know the difference, because sports culture has often said that you need to put pressure. Otherwise you're just talking about participation trophies and I think that's totally wrong. But I understand where it's coming from. You know, my goal would be to provide an alternative.
Speaker 1:What would you tell that parent? That is, what do those skills look like?
Speaker 2:I like to differentiate between process and outcome goals. An outcome goal would be becoming a D1 athlete. Outcome you have maybe 50% control because the other team is bringing something to it. Outcome goals are fine, but they're not sufficient. What I would say is that, focusing on the process, which is the things you have maximum control over how do I hold the stick? How do I hold the racket? What is my technique for my free throw those are the things where we want to draw our attention and our focus and our effort.
Speaker 2:If you say your goal is to win the game, great, how do you do that? And so I really encourage people to think how do I do my goal and break it down until you have a task list and generally, it would be make sure you're arriving to practice on time. You're focusing on the drills. You've got your actual technique focus. You're working on the drills. You've got your actual technique focus. You're working on each time You've got your homework squared away. There's a lot of those things that if we just focus on those and we're not concerned with the outcome, as much pressure gets taken out of the situation.
Speaker 1:Would mindset also be a process goal that a parent could encourage?
Speaker 2:I don't know if you're thinking of it this way, so I'm curious. But thinking of either fixed or growth mindsets? Yes, yeah, I'm proud of you for showing up. I'm proud of you, even though you were losing, for keeping a good attitude and still trying really hard. That's how I would be approaching it with my children, but that's because I'm a psychologist and that's how I think about things. Right, but it's crucial because what kids need is to have a mindset that they can get better. A fixed mindset says that I either am talented or I'm not. The growth mindset says I can get better and the best athletes get better over time. Yes, they're born with something special, but it's not this. Is that talent versus work, which one's more important? And the answer is both.
Speaker 2:When we have a growth mindset that's not focused on outcome for kids, especially the youngest kids, we give them the opportunity to freely make the mistakes they need to do to learn. Kids are going to need the repetitions in practice of doing it the wrong way. They're also going to need the lack of pressure to play so that they figure out the fun parts of the game and learn new ways and innovative ways to do it. But if their parent is on the sideline watching practice and counting the number of times they do the drill correctly, we're applying pressure. That parent may think, well, I'm tracking and helping them track their goals, but really all you're doing is distracting from what's going on on the field. That parent's doing that because they're not sure what else to do. More likely than not, they're trying to do something.
Speaker 2:You're trying to be helpful. I can't stress this enough. What we need to be doing is thinking of ways for parents to frame out their role in a positive, supportive way, where you know what they can't get from their coach is attachment Right. You know what they can't get is somebody who, when they get in the car, is just going to listen to what they say. How many times have you had a client come in and the parents are saying they get into the car after school and I asked them how it goes and they say fine.
Speaker 1:Yeah Right. Or they cried about the game on the way home and I'm like that's great, they're processing with you, Like that's what we want, you know.
Speaker 2:And how many parents kick into problem solving mode and say, well, this is what you should have done, or this is what you should do.
Speaker 1:Want to hurt your feelings but you really did and then proceed to hurt their feelings by giving critical feedback.
Speaker 2:So it's interesting, Like I'm really translating basic level family therapy to a sports context and just trying to put it much more specifically into when you get in the car, what do you do?
Speaker 1:What should you say?
Speaker 2:Right right.
Speaker 1:And my experience is parents want to know. They're literally saying, please tell me, because these are people that want to do right by their kids. That's why we have the issue to start with. They're well-intentioned, thoughtful, insightful people who really do want the best for their kids, which is how we ended up here.
Speaker 2:You know, I think back when I was a I think I was 14 and I came home from a game and my mom was a psychologist, my dad was a psychiatrist and you know, it's so funny like, even with all the training and family therapy, I come home and my mom asked how the game was and I said we lost, and that's part of knowing your kids. But I think the thing is, in these situations, kids get upset about it and nobody likes to see their kids in distress and so they try and stamp out the distress versus being the emotional heat sink and adding the emotional bandwidth of saying I can tolerate you being upset, so that you know that you can tolerate it and it's okay.
Speaker 1:Well, and I think the parallels to high conflict or to co-parenting sometimes is I can hear my child and hear what they're feeling and experiencing towards the coach, towards my co -parent. I don't need to tell them my kid how I feel I may need to correct something with the coach. I may pull the coach aside and be like don't do that to my kid anymore or this style really doesn't work for them. Same to my co-parent. But I'm not necessarily going to do that in front of my child and I'm going to like reflect and really think on whether it's something I need to address before I do it. But to my kid, with them in the room, you're saying I'm happy, you told me, that Makes sense, you feel that way. Let's talk about it.
Speaker 2:Well, I wonder in your practice if you ever find it where kids are complaining about a problem and they're kind of actually trying to draw their parents in to solve the problem, but it's actually not what they need.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think this is kind of a generational thing a little bit of you know. You hear a lot about like over-parenting and parents solving kids' problems and that snowplow parenting of just I'm just going to remove the obstacles and fix them for you and a lot of that, and I think this comes this is a real positive from something like sports is and unstructured play and unsupervised play and all of that kind of stuff is encouraging kids. You actually can say something. Did you say this to the coach?
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:How did you give the coach the feedback that you didn't love that practice or you didn't love that drill or the way he talked to you or the way she said that to you? And I think that comes out in multiple areas. It's also something I see a lot with peer relationships where I'll say like, but did you tell your friend how it made you feel before we involved the moms or the dads or the teacher or whoever it might be, just kind of encouraging more autonomy maybe and some resilience.
Speaker 2:Absolutely the way I encourage people to go. I'm trying to think too about like the high conflict or like the. I agree with you that the term struggles, but I don't have a better one, so just I'm going with high conflict.
Speaker 1:I hate it, but it's like what people know yeah.
Speaker 2:Right, and the Bill, the Bill Eddy perspective.
Speaker 2:I think one thing that I really see in those cases is that there's a narrative at play for each parent where their co-parent needs to be a villain in order for them to be not a villain, and I think that's an internal conflict of, like you know, I need to not be responsible for this or for whatever reason, and I think that can play itself out in the sports context, where the parent is looking for villains and anybody who gets in the way or causes discomfort for a child can feel like a villain. But here's the thing If you're a coach, even for eight-year-olds, you're going to need to give feedback that doesn't feel great in order for the child to go forward.
Speaker 2:Get better If you are reacting as the parent to protect them from anybody who makes them uncomfortable. That's the definition of the snowplow parent. But that's where your injury, your upset over what's going on in your life can translate really dysfunctionally into the lives of your kids. So you may be thinking that you're putting your kids first by protecting them or making sure that they don't get hurt. But you know, as a wise man once said, show me a person without scars and I'll show you a person that hasn't lived a day in their lives. They need to be impacted, but we don't want it to be scarring in that way where they function.
Speaker 1:It's such a fine line of I'm protecting them slip so easily into preventing them from being resiliency and to hear feedback and to handle criticism and it's I mean, that's a whole other. We should have a whole other episode on that. I am so happy to have this conversation with you. How can folks find you? How can people connect with you if they want to learn more about sports and youth sports and kids and youth sports and the co-parenting cooperative, all the things? What's the best way to get in touch?
Speaker 2:The best way to get in touch is probably through my website. It's alecbakersideecom. I've also got a new offering in the works. It's called Excellence in Process and excellenceinprocesscom is going to be our website. We're going to be offering webinars and workshops about, you know, positive sports parenting, so stay tuned for that. That's in the works, that's being developed.
Speaker 1:So teaching some of those skills that we were talking about and really helping parents know how to show up on the sidelines in a way that feels wonderful. And, of course, I refer a lot of folks to the Co-Parenting Cooperative for classes and teaching. You have a great staff that support families with co-parenting.
Speaker 2:Our blog is where I'm putting out content and trying to do the things that are kind of go beyond what's really required by the court for that class. So those will keep. They'll keep coming and then eventually we're going to turn them into recorded content for people to access.
Speaker 1:Wonderful If folks are looking for a talented therapist interested in working in the youth sports realm as parents or kids. Dr Baker is available for that as well in the youth sports realm as parents or kids.
Speaker 2:Dr Baker is available for that as well. Licensed in Pennsylvania and Colorado, available for virtual in both and in-person in Pennsylvania.
Speaker 1:Amazing, amazing. Well, I could talk to you forever. That's the Midwesterner in us.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:But I will let you go for now. But thank you so much for being on the podcast and we'll have to have you back.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you so much for being on the podcast and we'll have to have you back.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thank you very much All right, my friend, take good care you too. Bye-bye, Bye-bye. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of Kids First Co-Parenting. The best way you can support the show is by following, rating and reviewing wherever you listen to podcasts, and by sharing it with another mom who could use the support. You can also connect with me on Instagram and Facebook at Learn With Little House, where I share daily tips and encouragement for moms raising kids through high conflict divorce. And if you're ready to go deep and get more tools, scripts, personalized support and coaching, come join us inside the Kids First co-parenting community. You'll find the details at Learnwithlittlehousecom. Until next time, remember your kids don't need you to be perfect. They just need you to be steady and grounded and, as always, to put them first. Thanks for being here.