Let Your Kid Play (No Coaching from the Stands!)
We’re trying to develop a self-organizing creature into a capable baseball player.
One of our culture’s biggest blind spots is misunderstanding the role of consciousness. The pre-frontal cortex is not the doer — it’s the manager. It sets goals, monitors outcomes, and adjusts targets. The actual doing (performance) is executed by deeper systems in the brain and body.
This is critical for development: If you constantly override your child’s decision-making during games, you prevent them from building the connection between their own manager (pre-frontal cortex) and their body’s subsystems. You become the substitute pilot. That might feel helpful at the moment, but it slows down real learning.
I get it. I’m a father who loves his kids fiercely and wants better for them than I had. The urge to jump in and “fix” things from the sidelines is strong. But we have to fight it.
Let them play.
Caveat: This doesn’t mean letting them act disrespectfully—sportsmanship is something that should be encouraged in the moment.
It means saving your technical coaching and corrections for after the game, in a calm environment. During the game, you can be their loudest supporter and/or in observation mode.
How to Give Good Feedback After the Game
Focus on what they can control. You can use this simple framework—ask 3 questions and listen without providing feedback until they ask for it:
What did you do well?
What could you have done better?
What will you work on next time?
The following provides a more nuanced guide:
An at-bat that ends in a strikeout, for example, isn’t necessarily a failure. Ask: Did you identify and swing at a hittable pitch, was your swing timing matched to the arrival of the ball, did you swing with the intent to destroy the baseball? If the answers are yes, that was a good at-bat even if the result was an out. Better yet, we’ll be teaching the player this self-evaluative tool and others and you can check in to observe how they’re applying these tools!
On the other hand, getting thrown out trying to stretch a double into a triple when the team needed you on second? That’s a learning moment worth discussing with direct feedback about unambiguously poor performance. The ideal approach focuses on getting to the bottom of things first, which means not accepting surface-level answers while also helping the player feel safe enough to reveal something sensitive. The things going on in a child’s mind can be quite surprising—some examples of reasons I’ve heard for these kind of lapses in judgment:
A short-coming in knowledge about the game: “I though I needed to score on that play.”
A misunderstanding / poorly communicated coaching: “My coaches were teaching us last practice to take an extra base.”
A misaligned but respectable psychological drive: “My teammates kept saying how slow I am and I want to prove them wrong.”
A poor but understandable tactical rationale: “The kids batting next haven’t hit all year. I needed to tie the game to help the team.”
A psychological state that needs re-scaffolding: “I’m not having fun, they are jerks so who cares.”
An age-appropriate lapse in attention: “I thought I hit a triple. I forgot to look at the 3B coach.”
These are just a few examples to give a sense of the variety and creativity in young minds. The key to upping our game as parents and coaches is to recognize: (a) it takes time to figure out what’s actually happening, (b) the guidance needed varies based on the underlying phenomena we discover, and (c) it takes time to deliver the appropriate guidance. Post-game is when we have the time available to succeed in this process.
Synopsis
Your child needs to develop their own relationship with success, failure, and adjustment. Every time you yell instructions from the stands, you stifle that process. Let your child’s brain learn to pilot their own body. The more you step back during games, the faster they grow.
Focus on post-game engagement with a mind toward neurology and long-term development. Measure-twice, coach once.