It’s Bigger Than Baseball: The Mental Health of the Young Athletes We Love
Am I good enough? That question can follow a child far beyond the field.
Being the mom of a competitive baseball player has taught me something I never expected. I spend my professional life as the CEO of a behavioral health company talking about mental health, trauma, anxiety, resilience, emotional regulation, identity, and the importance of creating environments where people feel safe enough to be human. I spend my days surrounded by clinicians and professionals who understand that what happens emotionally in childhood can shape how we cope, attach, perform, and respond to stress later in life. Then I go home, sit behind a backstop, and watch my own son play baseball, and suddenly those clinical concepts aren’t just things I talk about at work. They’re sitting 60 feet away from me on a baseball field.
It’s Bigger Than Baseball
Competitive baseball is beautiful. It teaches discipline, accountability, delayed gratification, teamwork, humility, confidence, and resilience. It teaches a child that failure is part of learning. You strike out, you learn from it, and you get back in the box. You make an error; you learn how to recover. You lose a game; you learn how to process disappointment and come back the next day. Those are incredibly valuable life skills. But competitive sports can also introduce a level of performance pressure that children are still developmentally learning how to regulate.
And that’s the part I think we, as parents, don’t talk about enough. Children don’t have fully developed emotional regulation systems. They’re still learning how to identify emotions, tolerate frustration, manage disappointment, recover from mistakes, and separate an experience from their identity. Their brains are still developing. Their understanding of themselves is still forming. So when a child repeatedly experiences the message, spoken or unspoken, that performance determines approval, it can become much bigger than baseball.
It can become: Am I good enough? And that question can follow a child far beyond the field.
Performance Pressure and Chronic Stress
As a behavioral health professional, I know that chronic stress isn’t simply about feeling nervous before a game. Stress is a physiological response. When a child begins to perceive every performance as a test of their worth, the body can begin associating competition with threat rather than challenge. The difference matters. Healthy pressure can motivate. Chronic or poorly managed pressure can contribute to anxiety, perfectionism, avoidance, emotional dysregulation, and fear of failure.
And then there’s comparison. Youth sports can create an environment where children are constantly measuring themselves against other children. Who is bigger? Who throws harder? Who hits farther? Who starts? Who gets noticed? Who gets ranked? Who gets the opportunity? For a developing child, that can be difficult to compartmentalize. After all, adults understand that a roster spot is temporary, but a twelve-year-old may not.
Adults understand that one bad tournament doesn’t define an athlete. A twelve-year-old may feel like it does. Adults understand that development isn’t linear. A twelve-year-old may look at the kid beside him and wonder why he isn’t there yet.
That’s why our language matters.
The questions we ask matter. The conversations we have in the car matter. The expression on our face after a strikeout matters. The way we respond to failure matters. Because our children are watching us to learn how to interpret what just happened to them, if my son strikes out and looks into the stands, he’s not just checking whether I saw it. He’s looking for information.
Am I okay?
Is Mom disappointed?
Did I let everyone down?
Am I still good enough?
And that’s where I have to check myself. Because I can know all of this clinically and still feel it emotionally. I can understand anxiety and still become anxious. I can talk about resilience and still want to rescue my child from disappointment. I can tell parents that their children’s worth isn’t tied to performance and then find myself thinking about the score, the at-bats, the competition, and what opportunity might come next. That’s the humbling part of being a parent. Sometimes the person who needs the clinical reminder isn’t the child. It’s me.
Our Job as Parents
Our job isn’t to eliminate every uncomfortable emotion from our children’s lives. In fact, doing so can have the opposite effect. Children need opportunities to experience disappointment in an environment where we support them through it. They need to learn that anxiety can be tolerated, that frustration doesn’t have to be immediately fixed, that failure isn’t dangerous, and that difficult emotions eventually pass. They need to build a relationship with discomfort that says, I can feel this and still be okay. That’s resilience. Knowing how to struggle without losing yourself.
That’s why sometimes being a good sports mom means knowing when to be quiet. Sometimes my son doesn’t need another coach in the car. He needs his mom. He doesn’t need me to dissect every at-bat. He needs me to ask how he feels. He needs me to recognize the effort, not just the outcome. He needs me to help him process disappointment, not erase it. He needs to know that a bad game is an event, not an identity. Because baseball is something he does, it is not who he is.
And that distinction is clinically important.
Because baseball is something he does, it is not who he is.
A Child’s Sense of Self
When children tie their entire sense of self to achievement, their self-esteem can become fragile. When they succeed, they feel worthy. When they fail, they feel diminished. That creates a dangerous emotional equation: I perform well, therefore I am good. I perform poorly, therefore something is wrong with me. I don’t want my son growing up believing he has to perform to be worthy of love. I don’t want him to learn that mistakes make him less valuable. I don’t want him to believe that being the best is the same thing as being enough.
I want my son to learn that he can be deeply disappointed and still be okay. That he can lose and still hold his head up. That he can be corrected without feeling rejected. That he can work incredibly hard without becoming consumed by achievement. He can compete fiercely and remain kind. He can have ambition without allowing ambition to own him. And I think that’s where my two worlds, behavioral health and motherhood, meet. Because mental health isn’t only something we address when a crisis happens; it is something we build long before a crisis.
We build it in the way we talk to our children. We build it in the way we respond to their mistakes. We build it when we allow them to struggle without shame. We build it when we separate behavior from identity. We build it when we teach them that asking for help is strength. We build it when we give them a place where they don’t have to perform.
And maybe most importantly, we build it when they know our love isn’t conditional on their success.
A Parent’s Sacrifice
Unconditional love is hard for parents because we sacrifice so much. We give up weekends. We drive the miles. We spend the money. We rearrange our lives. We sit in the heat. We invest because we believe in our children and because we want to give them every opportunity possible. But our sacrifice cannot become their pressure. We chose this. They shouldn’t have to carry the emotional weight of everything we’ve invested. And sometimes I have to remind myself that development doesn’t happen on my timeline. He’s twelve.
My son is still developing physically, emotionally, socially, and neurologically. He doesn’t have to have everything figured out. He doesn’t have to be the best player in the room today. He doesn’t have to know exactly who he’s going to become. His job right now is to grow. To learn. To struggle. To recover. To discover what he loves. And my job is to provide the environment where he can do those things without believing that my love depends on the outcome. Because there will eventually be a last tournament, there will be a last early morning alarm, a last long drive, a last practice, a last time sitting behind the backstop watching him walk to the plate.
The Good Stuff
The uniform will eventually hang in the closet for the last time. The bat will eventually be put away. And childhood will quietly move into the next chapter. That’s what makes me emotional. Because right now, in the middle of all the stress and competition and wondering if we’re doing enough, this is the good stuff.
The long drives.
The conversations.
The laughs.
The teammates.
The disappointments.
The wins.
The losses.
The moments when he struggles and then figures it out. The moments when I look over and realize that the little boy I started watching play has become someone I barely recognize because he’s growing so quickly. I don’t want to be so focused on the next opportunity that I miss the child standing in front of me today. I don’t want to spend so much time managing the outcome that I forget to experience the moment. So, I’ll keep cheering. I’ll keep driving. I’ll keep investing. I’ll probably keep worrying because I’m his mom. But I’m learning to loosen my grip.
To let him play.
To let him fail.
To let him experience disappointment.
To let him develop his own confidence.
To let him discover that he is capable of handling hard things.
Resilience
Because that’s ultimately what resilience is. It’s not creating a life where your child never struggles. It’s helping them develop the internal resources to know: I can struggle and still be okay. I can fail and still be worthy. I can lose and still know who I am. I can be disappointed and still get back up. And one day, when baseball is over, those lessons will matter far more than the number of home runs he hits. Because the goal isn’t to raise the kid who hits the most home runs. The goal isn’t even to raise the best baseball player. The goal is to raise a healthy human being.
A young man who can handle pressure without being consumed by it. Who can experience anxiety without allowing it to define him. Who can face failure without believing he is a failure. Who can accept correction without feeling rejected. Who can win without believing he’s better than everyone else. Who can lose without believing he’s less than everyone else. Who can ask for help when life gets hard. And who knows, without ever having to question it, that when he walks off that field, whether he had the game of his life or the worst game of his life, his mom will still be there.
Not because of the scoreboard. Not because of the stats. Not because of what he accomplished. But because he’s my son. And maybe that’s the greatest lesson baseball is teaching me. The game will eventually end. But the relationship we’re building while he’s playing it will last a lifetime.
Looking Away
So, I want to remember to look up from the scoreboard. Look away from the statistics. Put down the phone. Stop worrying about what’s next, and watch my boy play. Because someday, I’ll wish I could have one more game. One more tournament. One more long drive. One more time sitting behind that backstop watching him take his turn at the plate. And when that day comes, I don’t want to wish I had worried less about whether he was good enough. I want to know that I was present. That I listened. That I let him struggle. That I let him grow. That I protected his mental health without protecting him from life.
And most importantly, that he never once had to wonder whether he was enough for me. Because the game will eventually end, but the voice he develops inside his own head will stay with him for the rest of his life. And as his mom. and as someone who spends my life in behavioral health, I want that voice to say, “You are enough,” even when the scoreboard says otherwise.
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