339 Parents: Helping your child advocate for themselves

Stop It Goaltending U the app and get yourself a InGoal Magazine subscription when you order. Hutch. Woody,

Last week we talked about, well, started from a question from a parent about their child getting some, let's call it vague feedback from a coach and had some advice for how to deal with that. And part of it was helping the child to advocate for themself. But we didn't get into a lot of detail. I promised I'd come back with a few tips for how you can help your child in that regard. I call it support rather than fighting their battles.

And what I would say is one of the most important and admittedly uncomfortable rules for goalie parents is knowing when to step back without abandoning your child. When feedback from a coach is unfair, vague, emotionally charged, the instinct as a parent, of course, is to step in and fix it. The old helicopter thing. We want to explain to the coach. We want to defend our child.

We want to restore, you know, whatever balance was there before. But as the goalies move up, that instinct often works against the very independence we want to build and and heaven knows that the coaches and GMs, could even hold it against your child if you're jumping in there trying to save them. So the long term goal here isn't to protect our child from hard conversations, and I think this is a good lesson for life, not just hockey. It's to help them learn how to handle those hard conversations. Now, how that looks, of course, depends on the child's age and their maturity.

For a younger goalie who often don't have that courage or even the language to have that conversation, you know, they're not ready necessarily to advocate for themselves and that's okay. That's normal. Expecting them to handle adult level feedback on their own is it's unrealistic. But you can often should just go with them as support. But the key is letting the child lead the conversation when they are able with the parent, you there to help them translate, clarify, or step in, but only if needed.

So here's how to help a younger child giving them support without fighting their battles. First, like I said, be present, but let them speak first. If your goalie wants to talk to the coach, you can go with them, especially when they're really young, but give them the chance to ask the question or share their confusion about the situation before you jump in. And, you're the just there as the backup. You're not the spokesperson, but you can be the translator.

If the conversation gets a little too technical for the child, a little too emotional, you can help reframe it for them. Say, what do you think coach meant there? Was there anything specific that you could work on? We're helping them to process the situation. We're not trying to, you know, fight the case for them.

We can also give them words before we we run off and give them independence. Courage comes after they have the language. So parents, you can rehearse some simple safe scripts at home. Can you show me what you want me to do differently? Is this about the games or the practices?

Remember, we'd last week been talking about a child accused of losing his work ethic. And even if they don't use the specific words yet, they're learning through conversation with you what advocacy can sound like. You should also normalize the fear but not take away the challenge. You can say, look, it's okay to feel nervous talking to your coach, but you shouldn't say, you shouldn't have to do this. One of them builds resilience, the other builds avoidance and that's not what we're trying to do.

And like I said, only step in if the child's really feeling overwhelmed, confused or sometimes look, maybe they're even emotionally shut down and then you might need to ask some questions yourself. But ideally, even if you're the one who has to do it, it would be great if your goalie was there with you so that they understand this is for them. Now, for the older goalies, the ones who can advocate for themselves, even if it's a little uncomfortable, your role shifts again as a parent and for some of us that's even harder. You have to move from the protector to the sounding board. Your job isn't any anymore to solve it.

It's just to listen to your child beforehand, maybe have a conversation. What do you want to get out of this conversation with your coach? What would handling this well look like to you? You can let them own the problem and they can own the response. And it's okay for the conversation they have with their coach to be imperfect.

As parents, that's one of the hardest things for us, isn't it? We want to jump in there and make it all perfect. Well, they're not going to be perfect. They might be misunderstood. They might come away frustrated, but that's not failure.

That's good practice for your child to go through that because they'll be better next time. Rescuing them from every awkward interaction, that's just going to prevent growth. Now, reinforce the trust though, for sure. Say to your child, I trust you to handle this. That's probably the most important message you can give them.

It's going to give them confidence as they're going forward. And you have to stay out of the echo chamber as we often talk about. Avoid at home relitigating the situation, how fair it is, how unreasonable the coach's comment might have been. That's not gonna work. We said that last week.

That just keeps the emotional wounds open and trains you to dwell on things instead of deal with them. Support means helping them move forward, not sit around replaying the moment. So so that's about it. Just to sum it up for everybody of all ages, the lesson's the same. Not all feedback from a coach will be fair.

Not all feedback from a coach will be clear, but goalies don't need us as parents to jump in and fight every battle. They need us to believe that they can handle the discomfort and believe that they're able to deal with it on their own with us standing there beside them, whether it's metaphorically or or in reality for the younger kids. That belief of theirs is gonna come over time and that would be the real win for us.

Well said. I kinda wish I had a lot of these parent segments for myself when I was parent coach not coaching, but being a parent to my young volleyball athlete. There's so many good lessons in here.

It's easy to preach. It's easy to preach.

You don't but you don't think about them in these terms a lot of the time. And, last week, you had numbers and, like, everything was sort of backed up with not just because, but, you know, some real concrete stuff. I mean, it's it's great and it's nice to have that perspective because in the moment, it can be really hard to sort of step back from a lot of these situations and look at it objectively because you are caught up in the echo chamber and in the emotions.

Funny, Woody, my father's a clergyman and I watched him give sermons every Sunday. And I never thought to myself that I would end up giving a sermon every week, and here I am. A little bit of a different topic, but, it is interesting to be preparing sermons every week.

Church of goaltending. Can I say that? Is that is that that's okay? I haven't crossed any lines there sacrilegiously?

Probably no matter what we say, we're crossing a line with somebody, but I don't

think you are there. No, Woody. It it we we worship at the altar of the crease. I'm just gonna keep going until I end up in hell.

You're probably gonna end up in hell pretty quick because somebody's gonna talk about you worshiping false gods or something and then we're in trouble.

Okay. Well, I mean

That's not me. I'm not jumping on you. It's all good, buddy.

His name was Carey Price. Only Jesus saves more, I believe, was one of the t shirts that we had.

Think that started with Bernie Parent, actually.

Sweet. There you go. See? I'm learn I'm once again, the parent segment has Kevin Woodley learning about goaltending and the history of it. Hutch, that was great stuff.