Next time you go to a local jiu jitsu competition, keep an eye on the behavior of other people there.
Not the kids or other athletes competing. Focus on the adults and more specifically, the parents.
Kids, for the most part, are remarkably adaptable. They have to be. They’re still absorbing and discovering the world around them at a rapid-fire pace compared to adults.
At a competition, a child may suffer a loss, get upset for a little bit, and then immediately will ask if they can go get some KFC on the way home. They may even win a gold medal, beam a proud smile on their face, and then a few minutes later they’re more focused around playing jump rope with their friends while they wait for everything to be over with so they can go play some Minecraft as if the entire morning of competition never happened.
On the other hands, adults tend to take things more seriously. Their kid may walk off the mat after losing and immediately they will try to seek out and look for their parent. They’re not doing this to look for technical advice but to see what their parent’s reaction is.
“Are mom and dad happy?”
“Are they upset?”
“Does this mean I’ve failed in their eyes?”
“Is everything going to be OK, I mean I just lost right?”
This specific moment reveals something quite important about youth sports.
A lot of coaches and parents look at youth sports and say they care about their child’s development. Physical development, socioemotional development, and cognitive development all come into play in this realm.
However, for some parents actually behave in the opposite direction. They are, specifically, fixated on the outcome. They want to see another trophy added to the shelf. They want their kid to be seen at #1, not #2, #3, or off the podium.
Trophies have one enormous advantage over development: they’re easy to count.
Nobody has ever struggled to determine who won a tournament. The medals are hanging around their necks. The podium photo is already on Instagram. The result is concrete, visible, and immediately understandable.
Development is messier.
It’s much harder to quantify increased confidence, improved emotional regulation, resilience after setbacks, or a newfound willingness to challenge oneself. Yet those traits are often far more important than whatever happened in a five-minute match on a Saturday morning.
Let’s do a quick thought experiment.
Let’s say you have a kid and they enter a local tournament and immediately lose in the opening round.
This, to most parents, is disappointing and not the outcome they wanted at all.
However, in a wider scope if that child was terrified of competing six months ago and was able to step into the competition on that day, it is significant progress in their development as an athlete but, more importantly, as a person.
It is a meaningful victory that child achieved and in many cases is far more valuable and meaningful than a $5 gold plated trophy.
If we’re being honest, part of the attraction of trophies is that they don’t just communicate achievement to the athlete. They communicate achievement to everyone else.
Nobody sees your child’s increased confidence walking into a room. Nobody notices that they’re handling disappointment better than they did a year ago. Nobody hands out medals for learning how to lose with dignity.
A gold medal, on the other hand, can be photographed and posted online before you’ve even left the venue.
That’s part of why outcome-focused thinking is so seductive. Outcomes are visible. Development often isn’t.
The danger is mistaking those outcomes for development itself. A medal tells you what happened on a particular day. It doesn’t tell you everything that happened on the road to getting there.
An uncomfortable reality of parenting is that children are far better at reading the vibes their parents are giving off than parents anticipate.
Parents can tell their children that winning isn’t everything.
However, if the drive home after their child loses at a tournament is a lengthy debrief over what should have been done, or worse, then it’s not surprising that a child will draw their own conclusions as to what is most important to their parent.
This is because children are highly observant. They observe and internalize what earns their parents approval, and what earns their scorn.
Research in childhood sports has for decades largely supported this. Young athletes who perceive high levels of pressure and criticism from their parents tend to experience a higher rate of anxiety and report a lower enjoyment in sport. However, environments that emphasize learning, improvement, and effort have been found to be associated with healthier (in terms of mental well-being) outcomes and more sustained participation and engagement amongst child-athletes.
Which as an adult absolutely makes sense. People perform better when they feel they are supported in those same areas. Far fewer athletes perform best when they feel they do not have much enjoyment in the sport they are participating in.
A unique aspect of jiu jitsu, but we can also apply this to any “individual-focused sport” such as wrestling, judo, taekwondo, singles tennis, etc. is that you are solely responsible for what happens during the match. In team sports like soccer, football, rugby, etc. responsibility is shared and distributed. A team loses and there are several areas you can point to for improvement that typically involve a shared responsibility for it.
However in sports like jiu jitsu, this is not the case. And there is something truly honest about that, which former UFC Light Heavyweight Champion Rashad Evans even explained. He noted that in high school his football team would lose despite him doing everything “correct”, which frustrated him and wound up pushing him towards focusing on wrestling.
The caveat however, is that this aspect of the sport also means any losses an athlete has can feel intensely personal. And that’s just the adults. How many times have you seen an adult athlete visibly show frustration at themselves after a loss? I guarantee it’s been plenty of times. Now, think about it from the perspective of a child.
This is why parental reactions to their children’s outcomes at a tournament are so important. A child won’t walk off the mat needing a detailed breakdown of what they did wrong. They know what happened, they lost and maybe they can explain how or where they think they made a mistake.
What a child is ultimately seeking out is reassurance that at that moment, immediately following their match, their parents haven’t changed how they view them. Which is an incredibly powerful sense of security and comfort.
Ironically, that sense of security is what helps produce athletes who feel more willing to take risks, because even if they fail they feel safe in an emotional sense to be able to look past that failure and take a more proactive approach towards improving.
Another thing that is also worth considering is that virtually nobody will remember who won most junior divisions. Like, across all sports.
Think back over the past couple of years. Try naming who the #1 ranked High School wrestler was in the United States. Try naming who the #1 ranked junior judo champion was. Now try naming who won the tournament your kid competed at six months ago.
Virtually nobody remembers who won most junior titles. That’s not because those accomplishments weren’t meaningful at the time. It’s because youth sports were never primarily about preserving a historical record of who the best kid at the sport is. Youth sports heavily is focused around one thing: development.
A child who tends to stay in sports longer is a child who wants to be more involved with that sport. One that still enjoys going to practice. One that is developing confidence in themselves outside of the sport as well as inside of the sport. One that is learning to be resilient in the face of set backs or adversity. One that has developed a strong social support network amongst their peers.
So maybe the question we should have isn’t if we want our child to win gold at the local competition. I mean, of course that is the “goal” but there’s more to what we can define “success” as beyond that.
The question we should be asking ourselves is if there were no medals, no rankings, no fancy podium photos, no highlights posted onto your kids BJJ Instagram account, would you still think jiu jitsu was providing valuable lessons to your child?
Would you still take them to class if they were always wearing a white belt? I mean, that’s how Jigoro Kano had it set up originally.
If the answer is “yes”, then congrats the lessons your child are gaining from the sport and community are doing their part.
If the answer is “no”, then we should ask “why? why is the belt/medal so valuable?”
I’ve been doing jiu jitsu and grappling in general for over a decade and I’ve seen so many parents just completely miss the reality that their kid is not them. In the USA we call them “football dads/moms,” in Canada it’s “hockey dads/moms,” in Australia it’s probably called “rugby dads/moms.” It exists in jiu jitsu but we don’t address it much.
Parents who see winning as the sole value of a sport risk not only alienating their child from the sport, but also themselves from their child. Youth sports are not the Olympics, nor will they ever be. Putting pressure on your kid to win every round of training only serves to create higher rates of anxiety, which is ultimately a harmful hindrance to their development.
At the end of the day, every athlete’s career will end. The wins stop coming. The social media posts of someone biting a medal stop being posted. All that will remain is the experiences one has had over that period of competition and training, and how those experiences impacted their life. Either for the better or the worst.
And both coaches and parents have a duty and responsibility to ensure that the outcomes for each child in their program lean more towards their betterment and not their detriment. And that’s not just in the realm of jiu jitsu skill development. Remember, that’s just one small aspect to what is going on.
Like I said, a trophy is just a $5 piece of metal with some gold plating that shows what happened on a random weekend.
What’s ultimately the most important thing is to ensure a child is supported and understands that one outcome is not all that matters.
I’m genuinely tired of seeing parents get bent out of shape because their kid didn’t win gold, or wasn’t winning rounds during class. Which is why those same parents I’ve also seen be asked to either stop sitting next to the mats at class, or even in some cases asked to leave the gym.
The sport should belong to the child, not the parent.
The longer I’ve coached, the less interested I’ve become in medal counts and the more interested I’ve become in who still enjoys showing up.
I’ve watched plenty of youth competitors up and disappear from the sport entirely. I’ve also watched average competitors develop confidence, resilience, close friendships, and a genuine love of training that stayed with them long after the tournament results were forgotten about.
Those outcomes rarely appear in podium photos, but they’re the reason youth sport exists in the first place.
A trophy tells you what happened on a particular day.
It doesn’t tell you whether the experience was good for the child.
And if we’re serious about helping young athletes grow, that distinction matters a great deal more than the color of the medal around their neck.