Key takeaways
- Specific information beats general description: "panics going first" is usable, "a bit shy" is not.
- Raise concerns early, privately, and with the actual issue rather than a hint.
- The car ride home is the highest-leverage conversation of the week — keep it light.
- Coaching your child from the sideline usually splits their attention and slows progress.
What is genuinely useful for a coach to know
Parents often hold back detail out of politeness, or a worry that their child will be labelled. The practical effect is that we spend six weeks discovering something you could have told us in thirty seconds, and the child spends six weeks having a harder time than necessary. Almost everything is easier to accommodate when it is known in advance.
The most useful information is concrete and behavioural. What does a bad day look like from the outside? What has helped elsewhere? What is the specific fear, rather than the general disposition?
- Diagnoses, sensory needs, medical conditions, medication timing, and anything affecting hearing, vision or balance.
- The specific fear: going first, being watched, physical contact, loud noises, losing.
- What a rough day looks like early — the tells before a meltdown, not just the meltdown.
- Strategies that work at school or home, so we can use the same language.
- Hard things at home: a bereavement, a separation, a new sibling, a bad week. We do not need details, just a heads-up.
- Goals in the child's own words, which are often different from the parent's.
Parent Pro Tip
The single most valuable sentence you can send us is a description of what your child does right before things go wrong. That is the moment we can act on; the meltdown itself is too late.
How to raise a concern well
Concerns are entirely normal and good schools want them early. Most of the difficulty comes not from the substance but from the setting — a worry raised in the doorway with twenty children arriving gets a rushed answer that satisfies nobody, and a worry that has been quietly compounding for two months arrives with a heat the coach did not see coming.
The approach that works is unremarkable: ask for a few minutes at a quiet time, say the actual concern plainly, describe what you are observing rather than diagnosing the cause, and ask what they suggest. Give it two or three weeks to see whether the adjustment works, then follow up. If something remains unresolved after a genuine attempt, go to whoever runs the school — that is what they are there for.
- Pick a time that is not the start or end of a busy class.
- Lead with the observation: "she's been dreading Tuesdays for a month."
- Ask, do not prescribe: "what would you suggest we try?"
- Agree a check-in point.
- Escalate calmly if nothing changes; do not let it sit and sour.
Anything involving safety, an injury, or how a child was spoken to should be raised immediately rather than at a convenient moment.
The car ride home
Athletes of every age remember this conversation, and a striking number of adults can quote the version they got as children. It arrives at the exact moment a child is tired, emotionally exposed and least able to process feedback, and that is what makes it so powerful in both directions.
The advice most experienced coaches give parents is the same: keep it short and warm. "I loved watching you" is close to unimprovable. Ask a light question if you want a conversation, and let them lead. If they want to analyse what went wrong, follow them there — but let them open that door rather than opening it for them.
Save any real feedback for a neutral time, if it is needed at all, and remember that it usually is not. The coach almost certainly said it in class already, and a second version from a parent tends to land as disappointment rather than instruction.
Parent Pro Tip
If your child is quiet after class, resist filling the silence with questions. Most children process on a delay and will tell you about it at bedtime, unprompted, if the car was not an interrogation.
Watching, sidelines and staying out of the way
Parents watching is generally a good thing, and we would rather families see what happens in class than drop off and disappear. The difficulty is only with instruction from the edge. A child receiving simultaneous input from a coach and a parent will attend to the parent, which means they stop hearing the correction they are there to receive, and they usually get slower rather than faster.
There is also a subtler cost. A child who is scanning for a parent's face after every attempt is working for approval rather than learning, and the learning requires being allowed to be bad at something in front of you without commentary. Some children do markedly better when a parent watches from further back or steps out for part of the class, and that is worth trying without treating it as a judgment on anyone.
Working as a team over time
The families whose children get the most out of training tend to do a few quiet things consistently: they mention changes at home early, they ask what to reinforce between sessions, they back the coach in front of the child even when they intend to query something later, and they treat attendance as a family commitment rather than a weekly negotiation.
None of that requires much time. A short message at the start of a difficult month, and one honest conversation a term, is usually the whole of it — and it is the difference between a coach guessing and a coach knowing.
Common questions
Parent Pro Tip
Send the coach one short message at the start of any hard stretch — a bad week, poor sleep, a family upheaval. We will not ask about it, and we will interpret the next two weeks of behaviour completely differently because of it.
From the Elevate coaching staff — general guidance, not professional advice.
Where to read more
- American Academy of Pediatrics (HealthyChildren.org)Guidance for parents on supporting young athletes and communicating with coaches
About the author
Elevate Martial Arts Instructional Team
Coaches, Middletown & Clearlake
Our coaching staff has taught children, teens and adults in Lake County for more than 20 years. Guides in the Learning Center are written from what we see in class each week and reviewed by the instructional team before publishing. They are general educational information, not medical, psychological or legal advice.
About this guide
- Written from what our instructional team at Middletown and Clearlake finds most useful from families, and from common issues raised in parent conversations.
- General educational information only, not medical or psychological advice.
- Where this guide points to public health or education guidance, the organisation is named and linked so you can read the original.
- Reviewed by the Elevate instructional team.
- General educational information only — not medical, psychological or legal advice.