The Kids Are Not Alright
I’ve been working with/coaching kids for almost 15 years now and she’s 100% right. In the past maybe 4-6 years there’s been a giant shift in the attitudes of children, and their parents.
— Trad Strength Coach (@based_coach1) November 19, 2023
Their attention spans don’t last long enough to get any work done, they have zero respect…
This Tweet came across my feed a couple of weeks ago and since I work with kids I decided to hop into the comment section (warning there’s a good amount of language here). This woman works with kids much like I do and although her demographic is slightly different than mine, I can absolutely see where she’s coming from.
I’ve been working with kids for the past almost 20 years now between sports coaching and sports performance, and in that time things have changed, drastically. In the past 6-7 years I have seen a change in young kids and it makes me worry about our country’s future. Gone are the days of respect, coachability, and discipline, and in are the days of disrespect, short attention spans, and scapegoating accountability.
What the hell is going on with our kids?
It Wasn’t Always Great
I’m going to start this off by saying kids have always been kids. As coaches, the things we’re seeing now have always been present, but the kids acting this way were few and far between. I can remember having some unruly kids early on in my career. Still, most of the time those kids were either just not ready to train yet (maturity issue) or just really didn’t want to be there, which happens more often than you’d think (think of parents living vicariously through their kids). Hell, I’ve even worked with pros making millions of dollars a year who hated the sport they played, they just knew it was lucrative and they were good at it, so they stuck with it.
Working with kids is a challenge in and of itself, but it was always rewarding. Today it seems like the kids are more and more unruly, and the rewarding aspects of the job are fewer and further between.
What Happened?
I can’t quite put my finger on when, where, or how it happened I just know at some point between 2015 and 2017 kids changed. No longer did I get the respect I commanded on the floor, no longer were kids coachable, and no longer were we able to keep their attention for longer than 15 seconds at a time. And this isn’t hyperbole, I will legitimately have kids drift off mid-conversation/coaching cue at times.
When I first started coaching back in 2006, I had a rule when working with the younger kids. We’d get about 7-10 minutes of work in and then we needed something fun. This was often instruction (which can be boring) followed by practical application (which can be fun if done right). I figured I’d be able to hold their attention for about that long, and it worked. Sure you had the few space cadets here and there but the vast majority of the kids paid attention, and more importantly listened and applied what they paid attention to. This is how we get better.
This is a list of the things I typically encounter every week in my gym:
Kids who are consistently late, when their PARENTS DRIVE THEM HERE
I get things coming up and these kids’ schedules are nuts these days, but to be 2-3 minutes late every time is a big F you to the coach.
Having to give the same cues over and over again for the same movements every single time these kids come in.
They fix it when I call them out, but I have to say it every single time because they don’t care to do the work properly. They can do it, but they choose not to.
We often have to hold mobility movements for time (which we don’t always want to do, it’s not optimal a lot of the time), because if I say 2-3 seconds I get less than 1 second and we end up doing it again and taking time away from the rest of the group.
I have to stop and remind them how long 3 seconds is every single time they come in because they’ll just blow through the work, with no effort.
Having to stay in the same part of the movement progression for MONTHS sometimes because kids won’t progress.
This is an effort problem, not an ability problem. When I get effort it’s fixed almost instantaneously
Having to repeat how many reps/sets for a given exercise.
I say it when I explain the movement, it’s on their individual sheet in their training folder, I’ll point to it on their sheet and show them, they’ll ask after I’ve answered the kid next to them that asked, and I still have to tell them when they get in the rack to do the set.
Starting work while I’m still explaining what we’re doing
We get new kids in a group all the time so the cues and movements need to be explained. While I’m explaining I’ll have 4-6 kids start the work so they’re done before the newbies start. There are important cues in these explanations, but they don’t care.
Talking while I’m coaching.
Not listening.
Not trying when they don’t like something they’re doing.
This tends to be the movements they’re not good at.
Not paying attention/not mentally present.
These things happen every day in my gym, in every session. Now I’ve got all the time in the world for kids who want to get better and are starting in a less-than-stellar position, that’s why I’m here. But what I have zero tolerance for is lack of effort, attention to detail, and disrespect.
Being on Time Sets the Tone
I grew up in a household where the mantra was:
If you’re early you’re on time, and if you’re on time you’re late!
I’ve always had kids who show up late, but it has definitely gotten worse in the past 6-7 years. Whether it was coaching hockey or coaching in the gym, being on time seems to be quite the issue for a lot of people. Back when I was growing up, you may have one or two kids that were just never on time. They’d be late, and either still need to tie their shoes or use the bathroom the second they walked in. You knew they were going to be late, and usually, it was just because a parent was struggling to get them to practice after work or school. It wasn’t a good thing, but it was seen as something understandable due to circumstances. The parents of these kids typically communicated with the coach that their kid would be late and in my experience they were always really apologetic about the distraction their kid being late would cause.
Today it seems that I’ll get 1-2 kids who are on time, and the rest are walking in a few minutes late still needing to tie their shoes or finish something on their phone (what are 9-12 y/o’s doing with smartphones by the way??). This causes such a distraction to the group and prolongs the amount of time it takes to get everyone dialed in. At best it’s a distraction, at worst it legitimately puts their kid in a position to get hurt when we get into training. The warm-up is designed to get you ready to train, certain movements are included in the warm-up specifically to prepare you to be under heavier loads. Missing out on these movements can cause you to perform less than your peak at best, at worst it can put you in a position to get hurt.
Also, push aside the fact that being on time sets the tone for life, you’re going to need that skill well into adulthood. Failing to prioritize this at a young age will make your life infinitely harder as you get older. Some employers won’t put up with it. I’ve had colleagues fired for constant tardiness at every level that I’ve coached at.
You’re not always going to be great at everything, you’re not always going to like everything, and you’re not always going to be performing at your best. But, there are three things you can control:
Being on time
Paying attention
Trying your best
It seems more and more I’m struggling to get these kids to have any of these traits in the gym.
TikTok Brain
It might sound dumb, but this is a real thing doctors and psychiatrists are seeing in kids (and adults). These social media apps are designed to give you dopamine hits to keep you engaged in their product. The longer you stay on their platform, the more ads you’ll see, and the more money they’ll make. The sounds when you refresh your feed are even designed to give you these small dopamine hits.
The average TikTok video lasts between 38.3 seconds (for smaller accounts) and 50 seconds (for larger accounts getting more than 25,000 views per video). This short duration keeps you engaged, while not allowing you to lose interest before moving on to the next video. This timetable is bleeding into our everyday lives. We’re being conditioned to be able to stay engaged for short periods before needing something more stimulating to keep our attention.
I’m seeing this in the kids I work with every single day. I can’t keep their attention for more than 10 seconds at a time, and that’s not hyperbolic AT ALL. I’ve had situations where I’m explaining/demonstrating a cue/movement to an athlete. We’ve got eye contact, they’re displaying all the signs of paying attention. I assume they’ve understood (mostly because they say they understood) and I’ll walk over to another athlete to coach them, only to have the first athlete come over and ask me what we’re doing. They’ve somehow not retained a single thing I’ve said. It’s wild.
I’ll also have kids legit drift off mid-coaching. I’ll be explaining a movement and talking with them only to have them look off in another direction and stop paying attention altogether. I had a situation in one of my racks where a new athlete was very out of position in his deadlift. I walked over to the rack to give him cues to keep him in a good position. I was there specifically for him. While I was demonstrating the movement, he walked away to check his phone. I almost lost it.
And it’s not just TikTok, it’s ALL of our social media. It’s all designed to keep you engaged in short spurts. Hell, there are 5-second ads on YouTube now because the data points to that timeframe being enough to grab someone’s attention without losing it. We’ve got YouTube Shorts, Instagram and Facebook Reels, TikTok, and we even had Vine a while back. We also can binge-watch shows now. Remember back in the 90s and 2000s when you had to wait a week to watch the new episode of your favorite show? That’s gone, now you can watch an entire 7 season series in a weekend. We can order something on Amazon at 8 am and have it to the house mid-afternoon. We have instant gratification at every turn. This is incredibly hard to compete with as a coach whose craft takes years for athletes to master.
Do me a favor, go run an experiment. Find your favorite social media influencer. Look at the views on their long-form videos let’s say on YouTube or Rumble, and then go check out the collective views on the content that they’ve clipped from the videos on TikTok/Instagram/Facebook. The clips crush the long-form videos because our attention spans are non-existent. I don’t know how to fix this at scale, but something needs to be done.
This TikTok Brain is destroying your kids and leaving them ill-prepared for the real world. It’s also been shown to feed into and create anxiety and depression in kids. If you care about your kids, get them off of social media. There’s nothing of importance for them, I promise.
Their Effort Often Sucks
Perhaps it’s the instant gratification of everything else in life, and perhaps there are too many distractions between social media, actual media, video games, etc, but I run into fewer and fewer kids who care enough to try every year. Now, there’s something to be said for fear of failure and there are a lot of kids who have to overcome this, but I’m finding more and more that if something takes effort, it’s harder and harder to get the kids to care enough to try.
Training takes years and years of effort and at times a ton of disappointment. To be successful, you have to have the mindset of “short-term sacrifice for long-term gain”. The things we do today won’t make us better tomorrow. In all reality, if we train hard enough today, we’ll be in a worse position tomorrow until we recover from the work. If you’re on any kind of fitness journey, you have to understand the mindset of short-term sacrifice leading to long-term gain.
You’re not going to see the fruits of your labor for months or years when it comes to the gym. And sometimes it’s even hard to see in real-time because you see yourself every day, and if you’re in a solid progressive overload the gains are slow and consistent. You don’t even really notice it.
I have a kid I’ve worked with for the past two summers. At the end of this past summer, I noticed a drop in his effort so I asked him what was going on. He expressed that he was unhappy with his training this off-season. When I asked him why he said that he wasn’t getting any stronger. I went back into his training folder and showed him that we had managed to add almost 50 lbs to his bench, and right around 100 lbs to his squat in addition to 100 lbs on his hex bar deadlift over the past 4 months (he had a relatively low training age and hit puberty this past year). He just didn’t realize how much stronger he had gotten because the gains were small and consistent. We don’t make giant jumps, but he was getting a little bit stronger every week. There wasn’t instant gratification, just slow steady progress. And he was a good kid who always gave 100% effort and had a good attitude. After realizing that he was getting stronger, his effort level changed and he finished the summer off on a great note before heading off for his season.
There are also kids who lack effort from day 1 in the gym/on the field. Most of these kids either don’t see the value in training yet or don’t want to be there. It blows my mind that today with all the information we have people don’t see the value of solid training off the field for their sport, but at 10 years old I don’t blame the kid. Parents need to explain to their kids why they’re doing what they’re doing and how important it is. We can only do so much in the gym if I don’t have the backing of their parents.
I’m also a firm believer in kids understanding the financial implications of their training. Training costs money, and while I don’t think your kid needs to know the specific dollar amount necessarily, I think they should understand that it’s a sacrifice for you as a parent to get them there and pay for them to get better. I think the effort levels would change if kids were taught to care about these things because they affect other people they love.
Disrespect
When I say disrespect I don’t mean blatant acts of disrespect, although I’m sure that happens far too often in sports as well. What I mean by disrespect are the acts many of these kids don’t even realize are a show of disrespect because no one has taught them that they are disrespectful (I’m looking at you, parents). Some of the disrespectful things I see fairly consistently:
Talking while the coach is talking
Not paying attention to the coach
Starting a drill before it is done being explained by the coach
Distracting others
Ignoring coaching cues
Lack of attention to detail in a drill
Disrespecting the facility
I had a kid spit on my floor earlier this week
Somewhere along the way to 2023 a lot of kids stopped understanding what respect really is, and how important it is for life. To me, respect isn’t just “yes sir/ma’am” and “no sir/ma’am”, it’s so much more than that. It’s respecting yourself enough to work hard. It’s respecting the coach enough to listen. It’s respecting your parents enough to not waste their time and money. It’s respecting the other kids in the group enough to not be a distraction. Parents, please please please start teaching your kids to not only respect their authority figures, but to respect themselves and those around them enough to try and be present and try.
They’re Not Sleeping or Eating
Now this might not seem like it belongs here in this blog, however, it feeds into literally everything else. Kids aren’t sleeping or eating nearly enough to recover, much less be present throughout the day.
The average kid who walks into my gym
wakes up at 6 am to go to school
Doesn’t eat breakfast
Sits in class for upwards of 7 hours
Eating one time at lunch
Goes to practice for 2 hours
Only having eaten once so far that day
Comes in to train for an hour
Maybe eats a protein bar on the way in
Eats dinner
Does homework until 10 or 11 pm
Falls asleep around 12 or 1 am
Wakes up again at 6 am for school
The average kid who trains here is doing some kind of physical work for 3 hours per day, eating 2 to 3 times a day, and sleeping 5 to 6 hours per night. With year-round sports, this is a constant schedule with more sport training taking the place of school during the summer months.
This math ain’t mathing, and there is no way these kids can perform at the highest levels of performance like this for very long. Eventually, the wheels fall off and they’re either going to burn out or worse, get hurt. Do you know how hard it is to be both physically and emotionally present when you’re constantly circling the drain of exhaustion? It’s almost impossible. And we wonder why kids are so anxious all the time.
Kids need to eat, and kids need to sleep. This example needs to be set at home by parents. As coaches there’s nothing we can do outside of giving guidance and keeping our fingers crossed that when these kids show up, they’re able to fully show up.
Let Your Kids Fail
I recently became a dad and although my daughter is only 8 months old come this Festivus, we’re already making sacrifices as parents to put her in the best possible position to succeed. Some sacrifices are time, some are effort, some are money, some are sleep, and some are our own feelings as parents.
It’s hard watching her fail even right now. It’s a sacrifice to let her fail and possibly get upset. But every single time we take a step back (we’re there to make sure she doesn’t get hurt) and let her fail, she learns something. She very rarely makes the same mistake twice, because she’s dealt with the frustration of failing. I hate seeing my daughter cry more than anything, but with those tears come lessons. And our pediatrician thinks she’ll be walking within the next month (at 8 months old) because of it.
I don’t know what the hell started it, but we as parents are awful at letting our kids fail. Part of it is probably because the stakes are so high today vs in the past. It used to be that you broke your arm and had a few hundred dollar hospital bill. Today the average arm break will run you $2500, and if they need surgery you’re knocking on 20k. There’s no longer only a feelings cost, there’s also a huge financial incentive to put our kids in bubble wrap and not let anything bad ever happen to them, that hospital bill would break many families today.
I remember growing up and having to do science fair projects. We’d go get our three-fold cardboard thing and pick the topic we were most interested in. I remember always having a subpar-looking science fair project and I legit just thought it was because I was bad at it. My friends always had super professional-looking boards that made me feel like mine was terrible. Come to find out, probably 90% of my friends’ parents were doing 90% of the work on theirs. I remember not being able to go play basketball with one of my friends one day because I needed to finish my project, and he told me “Oh, well my mom’s doing mine, your parents don’t do yours?” I was PISSED at the time. I remember getting upset with my parents wondering why I had to do a crappy-looking project all by myself. Today as an adult, I’m so happy they made me do it. If I was gonna fail it was on me, if I was gonna succeed, it was also on me. I learned more than just how to make a hurricane measurer or volcano those years, I learned that I can be successful without their help.
In today’s sports climate, there’s also a lot more on the line. Parents are under the impression that the money they spend now will help their kids when it comes to college (and they’re spending A LOT). Well, I’ve got some bad news for you and I wrote about it here. And I get it, you’re shelling out sometimes tens of thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours on these sports, you want to see a return on your investment. All this money involved has led parents to believe that their kids deserve a certain amount of playing time. I’ve seen kids absolutely embarrassed because their parents make a big stink over their playing time to the coach. Many times even the kid knows they don’t necessarily deserve more time and needs to work harder. My dad taught me to work so hard that it made the coach play me, and it paid off in spades at the junior hockey and NCAA hockey levels.
You also see a ton of organization hopping with families today. I’ve got kids who I’ve worked with who will play for a new organization almost every year and the reason why is almost always because “it wasn’t fair” at the previous organization. The coach didn’t like them or there was politics, etc. These kids are being taught that when things are hard, just go somewhere else. That there’s no value in sticking it out and getting better. Now I’m well aware that there are legitimate cases of kids getting the shaft in these situations, but the vast majority of organization hopping is because the parents want more playing time for their kids. It’s a horrible lesson.
Parents will often blame the coaches for their child’s shortcomings. And what’s worse, instead of telling their kids to work harder, they’ll tell their kids it’s the coach’s fault for not playing them. This is absolutely poisonous long-term for your kids. They learn to blame those around them, instead of looking inward. Look at our culture today and let me know how that’s working.
It’s Not All Bad
I know I’ve gone off a little bit here about how horrible kids are in this blog, but it’s not all bad. I work with some amazing kids who have done some amazing things both in the gym and in life. I work with some kids who bring their A-game every time they walk into the gym. I work with kids who will break their backs to do whatever you ask them to. They show up fresh, they show up ready to work, and they show up and show out every single session. These are also the kids who are signing letters of intent to play at the next level, they’re the ones representing our country in international competition, and they’re the ones who walk out of my gym a little bit better every single day.
These kids are the kids who are going to make it whether it’s in sports or in life. These are the kids whose parents didn’t give them an iPad as a babysitter growing up, they limit their time on social media and television, they have a “lights out” kind of bedtime at a reasonable time, they have the parents who make sacrifices to get their kid to their training on time, and these kids are on the path to success specifically because of those sacrifices.
I love what I do, and I love when a kid finally gets it. Seeing a kid gain confidence because of what they’re doing in the gym is pretty awesome. Sometimes the strength they gain doesn’t translate to any real performance changes, but that confidence makes them a different person. These are the moments and these are the kids who make coaching worth it. As coaches and teachers, we just need to have more of these moments with more kids.
Parents: Please Be Parents
I’ll close this blog post off here and say it’s time for parents to be parents again. I wrote about this earlier this year when I wrote my version of The Soft American. If you’re a parent please take a few minutes and go read it. If you’re offended by anything in this letter, please understand that I’m speaking directly to you.
Teachers and coaches are the ones trying to pick up your slack, and it just isn’t working. It feels like we’re seeing less and less respect and effort every single year. And every single year, it seems more and more like parents are skirting their responsibilities and scapegoating teachers and coaches for their children’s shortcomings. This is crippling your kids.
Be the bad guy and not their friend. Make them put their phones away, turn off the WiFi at night so they can’t stream, make them get up early enough to eat something before school so they’re fueled for the day, give them no choice but to be dedicated to whatever they choose to do, don’t overload their plates and expect them to do well, let them fail and learn, don’t make excuses for their behavior, teach them to listen and pay attention, and for God’s sake get them off social media. If you want your kids to succeed then you have to put them into a position where success is an option. Be better parents, the future is counting on you.
