How To Encourage Your Teen Athlete

If your teenager is an avid athlete, you know how much their sport can provide as much stress as it does fun. Thankfully, there’s a lot that you can do to help your child mitigate and manage this stress to improve their mental health.

Watch for Signs of Stress

One of the foundations of supporting your young athlete is watching for signs of undue stress that they may exhibit. It’s all too easy for teen athletes to become extremely stressed for several key reasons:

• Overscheduling
• Struggling to balance sports, school, work, and socializing
• Wanting to quit the sport but not feeling able to do so
• Pressure to perform well from peers, self, coaches or perceived pressure from parents

Many of the symptoms of stress will be apparent, so keep tabs on your child’s behavior and any complaints of feeling unwell. Physical symptoms may include frequent stomach/headaches, overly tense muscles, prolonged or disproportionate pain after an injury, or lack of sleep. If you notice that your athlete seems more irritable, withdrawn, or emotionally reactive, take note as these are common emotional symptoms of stress. Finally, watch for behavioral changes in eating habits, ability to focus and complete tasks on time, fatigue, and nervous habits like fingernail biting.

Support Their Mental Health

Good mental health is essential for all athletes, but especially teenage athletes. Work to help your child set healthy boundaries and coping skills for managing their athletic life. Ask them regularly about their stress and what problems are contributing to it, then help them break down the problem into several smaller actionable steps. Another helpful step may be to institute a “no [sport] talk” rule after games, practices, or when they should be resting. These breaks allow everyone’s emotions – even the positive ones! – to calm down following the sporting event so that the outcome can be discussed neutrally.

Another helpful tactic is to encourage your child to reframe how they think about their performance and the results of practices or games. Encourage them to focus on giving the best effort they can give in that moment and to measure their successes by the goals they have set for themselves rather than wins and losses. These reframing tactics can help alleviate some of the pressure to perform well that they likely feel.

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Support Their Physical Health

Helping your child support their physical health will in turn support their mental health, it’s truly a win-win situation. Make sure that your child is getting enough good-quality sleep; they should be getting at least eight hours in a dark room each night. It can also be very helpful to nudge your child to use exercise outside of their main sport (think: walks, running, yoga, kickboxing, etc.) as a good coping tool. Finally, help your child have a good relationship between their sport, food, and body by encouraging intuitive eating.