Talking to coaches and other adult leaders about your child

Joining a club, sports team, or other extracurricular activity can be a rite of passage for kids. It’s a great way to make new friends, practice life skills, and learn about themselves. 

With this, we also expect — or at least hope — our neurodivergent kids will succeed in those environments just like their neurotypical peers. But there’s no guarantee that adult leaders, like coaches, understand learning and thinking differences. Since we rely on them, it can be in your and your child’s best interest to share helpful information with them ahead of time.

On this episode of Parenting Behavior, host Dr. Andy Kahn discusses why it’s important to share information about your child with the other adult leaders in their life — and tips that can help.

We’d love to hear from you. You can email us at ParentingBehavior@understood.org.

Related resources

• 6 ways to improve your child’s self-esteem with extracurricular activities 

• Do IEPs cover extracurricular activities?

• How to get your child involved in sports  

Timestamps

(00:56) Why you should share information about your child 

(03:01) How to talk about your child

(06:15) Finding the right activity for your child

Episode transcript

Andy: Joining a club or sports team can be a rite of passage for so many kids. Having the opportunity to build social skills, be part of a team, and engage in a winning environment can be so much fun. But for neurodivergent kids, this can be really challenging. It's not always a guarantee that the adult leaders or coaches know about learning and thinking differences. And it's these adults we depend on to help our kids succeed. So, it's in your best interest that we know how to best talk to these people.

This is "Parenting Behavior" and I'm your host, Dr. Andy Kahn. I'm a parent and licensed psychologist with over 20 years experience working with families and kids with behavioral challenges. Today, you're gonna learn about how to share information about your kids' differences with their coaches and group leaders and how to help them succeed in those activities.

(00:56) Why you should share information about your child

When your child joins a new group or activity, it's not always a guarantee that the adult leaders of these groups are gonna know much about learning and thinking differences. So, it can be in your best interest and certainly in that of your child's, if you're sharing the right information and helping them get on track to help your kid have the best experience they can.

Why is this important? Well, in schools, teachers often have a lot of information about learning and thinking difference, and our kids have an opportunity to get fair treatment and opportunities to really be seen for who they are. In the community, the adults in our environments really don't often know much about learning and thinking differences, and that's typical or expected. So, when we're bringing our kids into real-world environments, it can be really important to share the right information.

What this also means is when your child is involved in a sport or a Sunday school activity or working with someone who doesn't have knowledge or fully support them in their differences, your child can be in a really difficult situation. If they're acting out or showing some absence of skill, they can be a child who's gonna get singled out, in consequence, or in some cases get booted from that activity. Take, for example, a child who is engaged in T-ball practice and who has ADHD. If they're having difficulty staying in their space or is blurting out and not listening to the coach, these kids are gonna have a lot of difficulty engaging in a team sport. So, if that coach has a little bit more information, it can go a long way towards guiding them towards being successful.

Also, if a coach is prone to quick discipline, what you might find is your child is getting an awful lot of negative attention and may have a difficulty getting engaged in a sport or activity in a way that gives them the best opportunity. At this point, you're likely to get a call from that coach or even worse, get noticed that your child is gonna be asked to leave that sport. So, this is gonna to be really important for you to help your child get this information in the right people's hands.

The goal here is to arm coaches and caregivers with information about your child that helps them both. In this situation, their ability to understand and intervene in a way that supports your child and the larger group as a whole allows them the chance to succeed and thrive. And yes, we're going to talk about the how-to next.

(03:01) How to talk about your child

One of the questions that parents often ask me is, "Well, how should I share this information?" Well, there are a few keys on how best to share information about your child's differences with other adults. First: be brief. Don't give all of the information at once. Just give them the basics that they need to be informed about your child. Keeping the information brief is important for two reasons. One, it limits how much information that a coach or caregiver knows about your child that might be confusing to them. It also respects their time. Your child may be one of 20 or 25 kids on a team. So, giving just enough information will show respect for that coach's time.

Remember, a lot of our coaches or either volunteers are not getting paid terribly much. So, they're gonna want just the basic information. And in addition, not oversharing about your child can keep the context of where their challenges are pretty limited to give your child a fair shake during that activity. In addition, your child's behaviors or symptoms are much more meaningful in the scenario that your child is gonna be in, rather than just sharing, "Oh, my child has ADHD" or some other diagnosis. Second: be early, meaning get that information to them before they have a chance to see the behavior. This shapes how they see your child and how they understand what your child's doing in that environment.

And finally, be positive. Shaping your child differences in a way that can be seen as a positive or additive factor. So, for example, your child is really enthusiastic or maybe energetic. These are terms that describe your child in a positive way for their coach or for their caregiver. For example, let's say your child is involved in tennis lessons and your child really energetic and may tend to be a little inattentive. Telling the coach that your child is great for helping to collect balls to organize materials between activities is a great way of corralling their energy rather than pointing out obvious problems. This reframes your child's differences into things that can be productive.

One additional helper in these situations is to think about how to set expectations up for your child as well as the adult. So, setting the expectations for coaches and caregivers means telling them what your child is capable of and giving them those expectations in advance. If they think your child is gonna be capable of a lot more than maybe you would expect, that child's gonna be set up for failure. So, I'll give you some examples here.

When you give early information to coaches about my child is good at, for example, hitting a baseball or my child is a really fast runner, you set that coach up for knowing where to place your child for success. The idea here is to set up expectations for the other adult and to offer advice on how best to work with your child. Another key here when we talked about being early, is about sharing information in advance to set the expectations realistically for your child.

So, for example, before the first practice or meeting or prior to the babysitter first meeting your child to take care of them, you wanna give them information to get ahead of problems, to give them about how best to deal with things before they occur. In addition, you wanna be very mindful of how they reach out and can contact you. So, giving phone numbers, opportunities to email you so they know that you're accessible.

Remember, this can be a really stressful process for coaches. So, if you're polite, available, and engaged, they're gonna be a lot more comfortable in working with you and your child.

(06:15) Finding the right activity for your child

When you're signing your child up for a sport or an activity, it's important to be intentional and mindful in that process. Asking yourself questions like, "What is the point of doing this activity?" Or "Why are we doing this activity?" can be really helpful. If your child has an interest, it's gonna drive them to being more successful. If you're doing it merely to fill an afterschool hour because you have another activity with your child, this may not be as productive for you and may not have as good an outcome.

Keep in mind that the people running these sports and organizations, may be able to help answer some of your questions to tell you about the kinds of coaches or caregivers, how well they navigate activities with kids who have differences. And this can really help appropriately match your child to the best case scenario for them to be successful.

Let's stick with the sports example here for a second. Let's say your child wants to play basketball. Maybe you're gonna know early on that your child is not gonna be playing in the NBA. That's OK. Most of our kids aren't. But it's really important to recognize that your kid may be engaged as a developmental athlete, meaning that they're there to learn the foundations of a sport or sportsmanship or how to tolerate frustration as part of a team. This means that the first goal may not be to win an activity, but to be involved well and to have fun.

The other aspect of that is how we emphasize this to our child, emphasizing that we're focused on them having fun, encouraging their effort, and being part of the sport or activity. This will allow them to have expectations for success that go long and far beyond them just winning a game or having an outcome they may not be under control of. The key here is to make sure that your child is in an environment that's developmentally appropriate and can help them become the kind of athlete or group member they want to be. If your child's on a team that's too competitive and they spend a lot of time riding the bench, they're not gonna learn as much as you'd like and they're gonna have those opportunities.

If your kid's really motivated to play on a more competitive team, the goal may be to start out at a lower level to learn and develop those skills together so they can work up towards being more competitive. But that requires goal setting with your child and making sure that this is what they're interested in. Be aware that some parents have stronger interests in their child being involved in competitive sports than the child actually does. And that's where we see a lot of behavior breaking out on the sports fields or in our activities around our community.

I know that it can be culturally difficult to put your child into a league or activity that's not as competitive or isn't going to have as much potential outcome for them as you'd like. But we have to keep in mind of what our kids have the most abilities and interests in. If we place our kids well in an activity that they like and they have the skill for, they're gonna be happier and more motivated to engage.

Thanks for listening to this episode of "Parenting Behavior with Dr. Andy Kahn." We'd love to hear from you if you have any thoughts on the show. You can email us at parentingbehavior@understood.org. I'll put the email in the show notes too, where you can also find more resources and links to anything we mentioned.

"Parenting Behavior with Dr. Andy Kahn" is brought to you by Understood.org. It's produced and edited by Cody Nelson. Editorial guidance by Gail Belsky. Music and Mixing by Justin D. Wright. Our video producers are Calvin Knie and Christophe Manuel. Special thanks to Dr. Karen Wilson. Briana Berry is our production director, and Neil Drumming is our editorial director. Our executive directors are Laura Key, Scott Cocchiere, and Seth Melnick.

Understood is a nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering people with learning and thinking difference, like ADHD and dyslexia. If you want to help us continue this work, donate at Understood.org/give.