By Dr. Christine M. Silverstein

Adapted from: Wrestling Through Adversity

This is the first blog that addresses the content of my free e-book “Unlocking Your Child’s Potential: Six Game-Changing Points for Sports Success.” It aims to help you aid your children in conquering fear, so they become resilient and confident in sports.

Sports parents are frantic

Within the past month, I had three sets of parents independently reaching out to me as a peak performance coach to ask for assistance with their teen athletes. They ranged from a 13- and a 17-year-old male and a 16-year-old female, who had great success in their early years on the wrestling mat but more recently seemed to consistently “freeze” like a deer in headlights during the final stages of their matches and lose after they were ahead in points.

The frantic parents stated that when their children were younger, it was easier to talk to them, especially when they were winning. However, now as teens, conversation became strained, when they felt pressured by college recruiters evaluating their performances or when they were vying to be selected on an elite high school or college team. They began to doubt themselves, asking: “Am I only as good as my last win?”

Since competitions have become win-or-lose propositions, this exact scenario occurs not only with teenagers, but with pros during major sporting events, such as the World Series or Golf championships when sportscasters question: Who will win and who will lose?

In fact, it happened recently with golf champion, Rory McIlroy, who, after many attempts, won the Masters on April 12, 2025, which placed him in the esteemed position with only five other professional golfers who have won all of the major golf tournaments. This was a historic event to witness, right? Yet on May18, 2025, Rory finished 47^{th at} the PGA Championship. To what do we attribute this set back? Is it a fear of failure, a fear of success, or a combination of both, when the “fight-or-flight” response of fear took over, and he lost his focus? How does Rory’s example relate to helping our children conquer fear and win through sports participation?

Putting youth sports into perspective to win in life

We know that participation in youth sports as kids sets the groundwork for establishing, testing, and understanding one’s own values, beliefs, and winning mindsets while developing confidence in one’s abilities. By learning how to hit a home run or by winning a wrestling match, with the support of parents and coaches, it can help young athletes to fuel their bodies with healthy foods and maintain healthy weights.

Sports can help transform anxiety and fear into useable energy to score in life while promoting mental health. The greatest benefit for your kids is that by playing youth sports, they can apply the same skillsets from the baseball field to the boardroom when they grow up and from the wrestling mat to the stage of life.

But when should this parental responsibility commence, where do we start as parents to help our kids grow through sports, and how do we do it? What instruction manual should we follow? As a peak performance coach, I believe imparting the Mindful Toughness® skillsets I teach to win in life, build resilience, and conquer fears should begin at a child’s birth. In my case as a new mom, although I did not realize it then, it started on the day my son was born. To learn how, read my story below.

How was I a “Know It All” but wrong?

Recently, I attended a family Christening, and it was beautiful to see the baby, who was born prematurely at three pounds, thrive and bring joy to everyone present. It brought me back to the time when my son was born after having three miscarriages, a long labor, and a Cesarean section where spinal anesthesia did not work effectively. Yet it was one of the happiest days of my life. As a new mother, I thought I was well prepared because I started nursing school at 16, learned about child development, and took care of young children as a student.

When the time came to create a family and raise kids, I thought I knew everything about child birthing and childrearing, at least more than most, but I didn’t. Since my son was born without an instruction manual, I had to learn what to do as a parent to nurture his gifts and so did my husband to optimize his success. Looking back to that timeframe, we now realize we were enthusiastic about what to do, but ignorant about how to do it.

I did not get to hold my baby until hours after birth. At that celebratory moment, a nurse placed him in my arms for the first time, saying, “I have worked in the nursery for over 20 years and see that you have the most beautiful baby boy, but he is long on eyelashes and short on patience.” I did not know what she meant, but I assured myself that I could handle any situation that would arise because I was an RN and had training in childcare.

Since I desired to be the best mother, I readily agreed to accept “rooming in.” I thought it would be easy to care for my son at my bedside and that he would sleep peacefully in his bassinet, like all the other babies in the nursery. However, he was actively moving around, trying to take off the restrictive baby bunting, and was attempting to push himself upwards from his abdomen to climb over the side of the bassinet. He weighed more than nine pounds, which put a strain on my surgical incision when I lifted him up for nursing. At that time, I began to understand what the nursery nurse had said to me, for the mental and physical pain I endured made me think that I had made a mistake by rooming in.

My first Mother’s Day

More or less, I made it through the hospital debacle somehow and brought my first-born home on Mother’s Day. Whew! Now we just had to get passed Day One and the rest of his life! We were so overwhelmed as parents. Since neither Uber rides nor Uber Eats existed, my husband drove into our small town in NJ late Sunday evening, when the shops were closed, to pick up the dinner he had ordered. However, he locked himself out of the car, which necessitated waiting for the chef to finish his shift to bring him home so he could get the spare key to drive back to retrieve his car. The baby was screaming and Mama was exhausted!

What did we learn from our homecoming?

As parents, what we did not know at that time was that our son was giving us the first clue that he was destined to become a champion wrestler—a sport we knew nothing about— and was learning how to escape from the bottom position on the wrestling mat on his first day of life. He continued this effort to become an escape artist by breaking through the straps of the baby carrier as a two-month-old and learning how to release himself from his car seat and open the back door of the car while I was driving on a highway.

His strong predilection to wrestle continued into toddlerhood when he grappled with his dad as a reward for being a Big Boy. At an early age, he announced that he wanted to be a wrestler and a builder. Both came true by the age of seven, when he fearlessly began to hone his wrestling skills on a team and his carpentry skills in our basement workshop.

Fear itself we learn from our parents

Early in my son’s life, it seemed that there was no fear holding him back. Yet, I knew from my studies that there are only two fears that babies are born with. The first one is fear of falling and the second one is fear of loud noises. Except for these two, fears are learned from adults, such as parents, teachers, and coaches, along with the accompanied anxieties that are empathically transmitted to them, sometimes unknowingly by us. This was true for me when my son became a teenager. What caused his fears at that time, I do not specifically know, because kids pick up everything, like when their parents have not yet cleared away their negative traumas, which in turn adds to their teens’ emotionality.

Neuroscientists have discovered how our brains work in infancy through “mirror neurons” so your children mimic our speech, our behaviors, our habits, our attitudes, and everything about us as parents. They even use our curse words. This becomes inculcated as they grow older with our good and bad habit patterns intact, so we have to watch what we say and do.

Think of the implications of this phenomenon in the world of sports when parents begin to reflect back on their own childhood values, some fostering positivity, and others not. The former being a positive role model and the latter focusing on winning-at-all-costs. This occurs when we praise our kids only when they win and put them down when they lose, without giving them guidance or recognition for their participation. It can make them feel like losers and that they are only loved when they win.

How an Olympian and FDR showed us to embrace fear and win

We can use Eileen Gu, who won two gold and one silver freestyle skiing medals at the 2022 Winter Olympics, as an example of an athlete who admitted she is in love with fear, as she balanced it with confidence and the ability to execute tricks safely while in the Zone. She prefers to see fear as her own best friend.

To end our discussion of embracing our fears and teaching our children to do the same, let’s end this blog with FDR’s inspirational words and what he taught us.

You can learn more about my peak performance coaching practice on my website, https://www.idealperformance.net and about my book: Wrestling Through Adversity: Empowering Children, Teens, & Young Adults To Win In Life, on https://www.drchristinesilverstein.com.

The book is available on Amazon in paperback, Kindle and Audiobook. It contains other case stories of interest from my practice and details on how to use Mindful Toughness® skillsets to improve your performance and meet your goals.

I invite you to follow me on my Facebook page, The Summit Center for Ideal Performance and subscribe to my educational YouTube channel, The Young Navigator, to meet me face-to-face.