Conversations with Kids: Conversations with Kids: When Goals Feel Like Pressure
For parents and guardians where we give you prompts so that you can have more meaningful conversations with your children to help them build key characteristics such as mental toughness, resilience, confidence, creativity, focus and so on.
A Questions for Your Kids
When someone talks about your goals in sport, does it make you feel excited… or a bit worried?
Ask them to rate themselves from 1–10 and explain why.
Directions for Parents
This question matters because a young person’s emotional brain develops earlier than their planning and decision-making brain. Big future goals can feel heavy, even if they have the ability to cope.
By asking this gently, you help your child put words to how they experience pressure and control. That understanding is a nice step toward building confidence, ownership and a healthier mindset around improvement.
Improves:
- Confidence
Small, achievable steps help children experience success and build belief in their ability.
- Sense of Control
When the focus shifts from outcomes to actions, children feel less pressure and more in charge of their progress.
Further Directions for Parents
If your child feels overwhelmed by goals:
- Break big targets into small, short-term focuses.
- Emphasise effort, learning and improvement rather than results.
- Ask questions like, “What’s one thing you’d like to get a little better at this week?”
- Notice signs of avoidance this is often fear of judgement, not lack of motivation.
Your role isn’t to push bigger goals it’s to help your child feel safe, capable and supported as they grow.
Ideas for Kids
Before your next training, practice session or competition:
- Pick one small thing to focus on (for example: communication, effort, staying positive after mistakes).
- After the session or competition, rate yourself from 1-10 on how well you did and work out what you learned, as well as what you might do differently next time.
Small actions build confidence over time.
Helpful Resources
Some Final Thoughts for Parents
As children move through their pre-teen and teenage years, they often feel pressure more strongly than they can manage. When goals feel too big or too far away, their instinct may be to avoid them or shut down.
This isn’t a lack of ambition it’s their brain trying to protect them from feeling judged or overwhelmed.
When you help your child focus on small steps, effort and learning, you’re building something far more powerful than motivation.
You’re helping them believe:
“I can handle this.”
And that belief supports confidence, resilience and wellbeing not just in sport, but in life.
If you would like to share your experiences as a sports parent or get insights regarding kids sport psychology, you may also wish to join David in The Sport Psychology Hub.
You can also join our online community – THE SPORTS PSYCHOLOGY HUB – for regular Sports Psychology tips, podcasts, motivation and support.
Best Wishes
David Charlton
Global Sports Psychologist who is located near Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK and willing to travel Internationally. David also uses online video conferencing software (Zoom, Facetime, WhatsApp) on a regular basis and has clients who he has supported in the UK, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Australia and New Zealand.
Managing Director – Inspiring Sporting Excellence and Founder of The Sports Psychology Hub. With over 15 years experience supporting athletes, coaches, parents and teams to achieve their goals, quickly.
