The Reps We Removed & The Price We Pay
How "good parenting" has resulted in challenges for today's athletes (and frustration for their coaches).
As a parent of young children, I understand the instinct.
The urge to do it for them because “we’re going to be late”, to intervene early before a sibling argument can escalate, and to prevent an injury before it happens with a simple, “no ma’am, that’s not safe”.
Because when you love your child deeply, protection can feel like good parenting.
But lately, I’ve started wondering if many of us — myself included — have prioritized protection at the expense of preparation.
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation, writes:
“Safetyism is an experience blocker. When we make children’s safety a quasi-sacred value and don’t allow them to take any risks, we block them from overcoming anxiety, learning to manage risk, and learning to be self-governing, all of which are essential for becoming healthy and competent adults.”
That phrase — experience blocker — has stayed with me.
And when I listen to coaches describe today’s athletes, I hear echoes of it everywhere.
“Kids these days are terrified of failure.”
“They’d rather not try than risk looking bad.”
“They shut down quickly when things get hard.”
“They avoid situations that are remotely uncomfortable.”
These comments are often framed as criticisms of Gen Z athletes, but I’m not convinced the issue is fragility as much as unfamiliarity.
Today’s young people are not less capable.
They’re simply less practiced.
Less practiced at discomfort.
Less practiced at uncertainty.
Less practiced at navigating conflict, embarrassment, boredom, failure, and recovery.
In an effort to keep kids safe, we’ve unintentionally reduced the number of reps they’ve had at doing hard things.
And just like developing the basic skills for a sport, the reps matter - because confidence, resilience, and emotional strength are built through repeated exposure to manageable difficulty.
A child climbs too high and figures out how to get down.
A teenager forgets an assignment and deals with the consequence.
An athlete performs poorly and learns they can survive the disappointment.
A student has an awkward conversation without an adult rescuing them midway through it.
As a parent, this has challenged me deeply because my instincts often move in the opposite direction. I want to help quickly. I want to prevent harm. And admittedly, sometimes I just want the chaos of the situation to stop for the sake of my sanity...
In these moments I have to constantly remind myself to step back so as not to disrupt their development or reduce opportunities for self-governance — the exact skill Haidt warns is essential for healthy adulthood.
Many young athletes are arriving in competitive environments without enough evidence that they can handle difficulty independently. Not because they’re weak, but because adults have often managed too much of the struggle for them. Over time athletics has become increasingly adult-managed;
Parents intervene.
Coaches over-direct.
Adults solve team conflict too quickly.
Performance becomes curated.
Failure becomes personalized.
And as a result, we see…
An athlete avoids trying a new position because they might fail publicly.
A player rejects feedback because mistakes feel threatening instead of informative.
A team struggles with accountability because discomfort feels unsafe rather than normal.
A captain hesitates to lead peers because conflict feels catastrophic.
These are not simply sports problems.
They are life rehearsal problems.
Sports used to naturally provide many of the developmental experiences children no longer regularly encounter elsewhere: risk-taking, independence, conflict navigation, delayed gratification, uncertainty, recovery after failure, and unsupervised problem-solving.
But slowly, the space where resilience was once developed has gotten smaller.
If we want “kids these days” to be different, we have to be the first to move. We need to stop criticizing young people for being anxious or risk-averse, and instead help them accumulate evidence.
Evidence that they can fail and recover.
Evidence that discomfort is survivable.
Evidence that mistakes are temporary.
Evidence that they can navigate challenge without immediate adult intervention.
In other words: more reps.
Not reckless exposure. Not abandonment. Not “toughening kids up” through humiliation. Simply more opportunities to struggle productively.
If coaches can make detailed practice plans to rep core sport skills, then we can also build opportunities into our training sessions to rep discomfort, frustration tolerance, failure recovery, and increased risk-taking.
And while this used to happen implicitly, we now need to make it explicit. Today’s athletes value transparency, so tell them what and why before you begin.
“This drill is specifically designed to frustrate you. We’re going to practice frustration to build the tolerance needed to be successful when navigating competitive adversity.”
As I mention in “Kids These Days: Effective Strategies for Coaching Gen Z and Beyond”, whenever you find yourself frustrated by something a young person lacks, please remember - it’s not impossible, it’s simply unpracticed.
They CAN do this - and we can help.
With gratitude,
Betsy
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