What Competitive Pressure Actually Looks Like in a Kid
When a kid is struggling with competitive pressure, it shows up as one of two things. Either they minimise it, trying to hide from their parents or coaches that they're failing or scared to fail. Or they go the complete opposite way and erupt, emotion fully exploding out of them.
Both reactions come from the same root cause: the kid doesn't know what to do. Their brain isn't developed enough to process the situation calmly, and they haven't been given the tools to deal with it, so they just react. What looks like a complete overreaction or a complete shutdown is really the same problem showing up in two different directions. Kids need to understand their own bodies so they don't buckle under pressure. They need to learn how to move through it, breathe through it, and understand what's actually happening to them before they react.
My Stepson's Story: From Exploding to Standing Calm
One of the best examples I have of this is my eight-year-old stepson.
Earlier in the season, if a tackle went hard or something didn't go his way, he'd immediately believe the other kid did it on purpose. He'd completely explode, crying, not wanting anyone near him, with no idea how to process what he was feeling.
We worked on this over time. When something happened, we'd help him look at it honestly. Is there actually proof that the other kid meant to hurt you, or were they just trying to make a tackle? We gave him the questions to work it out himself instead of handing him the answer. Alongside that, we introduced breathwork before bed and at training, to help him come back to his body, his breath, and his nervous system, and to give him a way to actually calm situations down instead of being run by them.
A few weeks ago, a kid was giving him a hard time, pushed him, tried to kick things off. My stepson just stood there, looked at him, and said, "what's your problem, mate?" He didn't react. He took the time to respond instead, and stayed so calm that the other kid was the one who ended up looking silly. I was so proud of him in that moment.
Teaching Kids to Question What They're Feeling
You can't build this skill on the field alone. It has to start at home.
It comes from how you respond when your kid does something wrong at school, or gets something wrong at home. Showing them it's not the end of the world. Giving them a sense that this is a safe place to fail, with no real consequence for failing or succeeding, only the effort they put in. Once a kid knows that, they start to calm down, and that calm translates onto the field and into training. This is the same principle behind why kids quit sport in the first place — pressure to perform, not lack of talent, is usually what pushes them out.
One of my favourite moments came from my stepson with a different coach recently. The coach kept telling him, "you've gotta win, you've gotta win." My stepson turned around and said, "yeah, but you don't learn much from winning. You learn more from losing." That's such a sharp piece of insight from an eight-year-old, and it told me everything I needed to know about what's actually landed in him. It's almost exactly the mindset behind why Norway removed scores from kids' sport until age 13 and still went on to dominate the Olympics.
The Breathwork Behind It
The heart of this work is teaching a kid to come back to their breath.
Most of us just respond and react. We start breathing heavy without noticing, and we let that heavy, chaotic breathing drive how we act. The alternative is learning to be proactive with your breath instead, understanding the different gears of breathing and choosing which one to be in, rather than letting your breath choose it for you.
That means longer inhales, longer exhales, slowing the heart rate and the nervous system down, and bringing the whole emotional state back to a normal, steady level. This isn't just a feeling. A peer-reviewed study measuring children's heart rate and heart rate variability found that just a few minutes of guided deep breathing measurably lowered kids' physiological arousal in everyday group settings, with the calming effect driven directly by the breathing itself.
It works the same way for every kid, whether they're the quiet, insecure type or the loud, explosive type. Your breath doesn't care which one you are. Once you understand how to use it to your advantage, it becomes the biggest thing you have full control over, as a human, in any pressure moment.
What Parents Get Wrong on the Sideline
One of the most common mistakes parents make is failing to stay calm for their kid on the sideline. The excitement is real, you want to see them play well, and it's easy to overdo it, shouting instructions, reacting to every mistake with your hands in the air or a disappointed face.
Kids notice. They'll look over to you on the sideline more times during a game than you'd expect. An Australian study surveying 67 teenage team-sport athletes found that parents' sideline behaviour directly predicted how the kids themselves behaved on the field — positive sideline behaviour was linked to more prosocial play toward teammates and opponents, while negative sideline behaviour was linked to more antisocial, aggressive play. If every time they look over they see you reacting to their mistakes, they feel that, more than anything else that happens in the game. But if they look over and see you calm and collected, a small nod or a thumbs up, that's all they need. It tells them you're watching, you understand, and you're their rock. That calm co-regulates them, and it's one of the biggest wins any parent can give their kid.
Where the Pressure Peaks Hardest
Competitive pressure doesn't build gradually across a game. It spikes in single moments, a missed one-on-one, an easy shot that didn't go in, something that feels huge to the kid in that exact instant.
These are make-or-break moments. If a kid is consistently shown that a mistake or a missed opportunity is what matters most, that belief embeds itself and can eventually make them stop trying altogether. In these moments, the outcome has to matter less than the effort. Show your kid how much you're watching and valuing their effort, not the result, and that's genuinely all they need to hear.
If you know exactly which moments hit hardest in your house, whether it's the night before, the warm-up, or the drive home after a tough loss, The Unshakeable Parent walks through six specific game-day pressure protocols built for these exact windows.
What to Say in the First Ten Seconds
When a kid is starting to blow up mid-game, the simplest thing you can do in those first ten seconds is ask them to come back to their breath. They probably don't have the tools yet to do it alone, but everyone already knows how to breathe. If you do it with them in that moment, co-regulating alongside them, that's gold.
It Works the Same for Every Kid
It doesn't matter whether you're dealing with a quiet, insecure kid or a loud, explosive one. The approach is identical. Your breath works the same way no matter who you are. Once you understand how to control it and use it to your advantage, it becomes one of the few things every single human has full command over, as long as you build the awareness to use it. This links back to what I've written before about how real confidence in young athletes is built from the body first, not from words or pep talks.
The First Step Is Yours, Not Theirs
If a parent wants to start building this in their kid this week, the first step isn't something to teach the kid at all. It's something to look at in yourself.
Are you a habitual mouth breather, reactive and tense, or are you calm, breathing in and out through your nose? Your kids are going to follow what you do, not what you tell them. If you're not regulating your own state and your own breath, there's no way your kid will learn to regulate theirs. It's not just about them. It's about showing them, through you, what calm and regulated actually looks like.
If your child's pressure response is showing up physically as well as emotionally, tight shoulders, poor posture, a stride that falls apart under stress, it's worth getting their movement looked at directly. Fire The Engine gives them a real, physical experience of feeling calm and in control in their own body, which is often the fastest way to build the internal proof that breathwork and self-talk alone can take much longer to reach.
Why This Matters So Much
There is so much pressure on sport today, especially youth sport, and none of it originates with the kids themselves. It comes from parents' expectations and coaches' expectations layered on top of them.
It's essential for kids of any age to understand they can control the situation they're in, instead of constantly performing for everyone else around them. When a kid can calm themselves down and act proactively instead of reactively, life gets happier and more pleasant for them. They become more resilient, more confident kids, and that doesn't stay contained to the field. It carries into schoolwork, into relationships, into a happier home. This is exactly why we need to teach this to our kids as early as possible, rather than waiting until the pressure has already done its damage.