Guest Episode: The Emotional Side of Youth Sports Parenting with Jonathan Carone and Sports Psychologist Dr. Jonathan Jenkins

Youth sports don’t just test kids, they test parents too. The demands can leave parents stretched thin, emotional, and burnt out.

This week, guest host Jonathan Carone, founder of Healthy Sports Parents, sat down with Dr. Jonathan Jenkins, a team psychologist for the New England Patriots and Boston Red Sox, to explore why youth sports carry so much weight for parents.

Their conversation centers on awareness, connection, identity, and the things parents can control when emotions run high.

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Key Takeaways

The Emotional Toll of Youth Sports

Parents often enter youth sports with good intentions, but the environment can quickly stir up feelings they didn’t anticipate. Jonathan Carone says that watching your child play sports can “…bring up every insecurity you ever had for your entire life while you watch these eight-year olds play soccer pretty terribly on a Saturday morning.”

He describes this experience as “the hardest part of the youth sports journey.” Watching kids fail or struggle can trigger feelings from parents’ own childhood. The important thing is being aware when these feelings come up.

Dr. Jenkins advises parents to find their purpose at the game: “My purpose is to support, encourage, to be a resource, but not to be a source of stress and frustration.”

Comparison Only Adds Pressure

 Jonathan’s theory on comparison is that when parents seek validation from other adults, that’s when the pressure starts to rise.

Dr. Jenkins emphasizes that parents need to find validation from within themselves, not from other people.

Identity Beyond Sports Parenting

Jonathan points out that parents often get sucked into their new identity as a "soccer mom" or "football dad". As a result, some parents center their lives around that:

“When our identity is in our kid’s sport, their performance impacts what we feel about ourselves at a human level.”

To stay grounded, Dr. Jenkins tells parents that while it is important that they care deeply about their children, they also need to have other things that are important to them. When parents over-identify with their child’s sport, it can often mean they are unfulfilled in other aspects of their lives. He tells parents to ask themselves: “What other areas of my life are bringing me joy or could bring me joy and how do I access them and how can I take on things for myself?”