Parents That Coach: Navigating the Dual Role Without Losing Either

Leilanie Pakoa
2 days ago
6 min read

It is one of the most common arrangements in junior sport, and one of the least supported at times. A parent steps in to coach because the club needs someone, because they have the expertise, because they want to be involved, or because no one else will. And what begins as a practical solution becomes one of the most psychologically complex relationships in sport: the parent-coach and their child-athlete, trying to be two things at once, often without anyone helping them figure out how.

Two men sit on a green gym floor, facing each other, high-fiving during exercise. One wears an orange shirt, the other a dark one.

The dual role is not inherently a problem, if anything it is extremely common within the whole sporting system. It is also, at times, not avoidable. There can be great positivities and insights gained from this dual role experience, however there are some considerations. The research is clear, that without intentional structure, the role can quietly damage the parent-child relationship, the athlete's enjoyment of sport, and the coach's effectiveness. It is worth getting right.

Why the Dual Role Is Different

The relationship between a coach and an athlete is already a complex one. Sport psychology research on the coach-athlete relationship, most notably Jowett's 3+1Cs model, describes it as a relationship requiring closeness, commitment, complementarity (each person knowing their role), and co-orientation (shared understanding of goals), (Jowett, 2017). This is hard enough to build between two people who only meet a couple times a week for training and games.

Now overlay it with the parent-child relationship, itself a relationship of attachment, identity, and lifelong emotional history, and you have two relationships occupying the same physical space, often using the same words to mean different things. "I'm disappointed" hits one way from a coach and another way entirely from a parent. "Let's go again" said at training is heard differently when the same person says it on the drive home.

The dual-role research consistently finds that the boundary problem, keeping the two relationships from bleeding into each other, is the central challenge (Weiss & Fretwell, 2005; Jowett et al., 2014). When the boundary is unclear, athletes report not knowing whether feedback is coach-feedback or parent-feedback, struggling to switch off from sport at home, and experiencing higher levels of pressure than peers with non-coaching parents.

The Car Ride Home

The most quoted finding in parent-sport research is the "car ride home", the period after training or competition when athletes are most vulnerable to feedback from parents, and when post-event commentary has the largest effect on enjoyment, motivation, and retention in sport. Studies of athletes consistently find that what they want most from parents in the car after sport is something simple: "I love watching you play" (Brown & Miller, 2008; Dorsch et al., 2015).

For parent-coaches, the car ride home is doubly loaded. The coaching feedback is already delivered. The post-event analysis can wait. What the athlete needs in that moment is a parent, not a continuation of the training session or game analysis. Many parent-coaches I have worked with describe this transition as the hardest part of the role, precisely because their attention is full of coaching observations they want to share. Restraint is not the same as silence; it is choosing the right relationship in the right moment.

Identity Tension and the "Switch"

One of the recurring patterns in dual-role research is identity tension, the parent-coach experiencing internal conflict about which role they are occupying at any given time, and the child-athlete uncertain how to read them (Weiss & Fretwell, 2005). Some practical strategies that emerge from the literature and from clinical practice:

Make the role explicit. Tell your child clearly which hat you are wearing, and when. "Right now I'm coaching" and "Right now I'm just Mum/Dad" sound simplistic, but they help young athletes regulate what they take in and how.
Use physical and temporal markers. Some families set rules: no sport talk in the car for the first ten minutes. Coaching conversations happen on the field, parenting conversations happen at home. The boundary is more important than the specific rule.
Be the parent first when in doubt. When the two roles conflict, when your child is upset, hurt, or struggling, the parent role takes precedence. Coaching can wait. Connection can not.

Sibling and Team Dynamics

A less discussed dimension of the parent-coach role is what it means for siblings, teammates, and the coach's perceived fairness. Research on parental favouritism perception in sport finds that teammates are highly attuned to whether the coach's child is treated differently, and any deviation in either direction has consequences (Schmid et al., 2020).

Many parent-coaches over-correct, becoming harder on their own child to avoid the perception of favouritism. Athletes whose parents do this often report it as one of the most damaging aspects of the dual role: they receive less warmth from the coach than their teammates do, and the parent's attempt to be "fair" becomes felt as a withdrawal of approval.

Siblings also matter. If one child is being coached by the parent and another is not, the family ecosystem shifts. The coached child may feel scrutinised; the uncoached child may feel less prioritised. Talking about this openly with all the children, not just the one in the team, helps protect family relationships.

When to Step Back

There are moments when stepping out of one of the roles is the right call. Research and clinical experience suggest some signals worth watching:

The child stops enjoying the sport, or starts performing for the parent rather than for themselves
The parent-child relationship is being damaged outside of sport
The athlete's progression requires a coach with different expertise
The parent is finding it difficult to manage their emotional reactions to their child's performance
The athlete is moving into adolescence and needs more autonomy from their parent in the sporting space (Holt et al., 2009)

Stepping back from the coaching role is not a failure. It is a recognition that the relationship the child needs is changing, and that the parenting relationship is the one with lifelong stakes. Many of the parent-coaches who have managed the dual role best are also the ones who knew when to hand it on.

What Organisations and Other Coaches Can Do

The dual role is not only a private matter. Clubs and organisations that lean on parent-coaches without supporting them set everyone up to struggle. Things that help:

Provide induction and ongoing education specifically for parent-coaches, addressing the dual-role dynamic explicitly
Build in formal feedback channels for athletes who are coached by their parents, so they have a way to raise concerns that does not require confronting their parent directly
Encourage co-coaching arrangements, so the parent-coach is not the sole point of contact for their child/athlete
Normalise the language of the dual role at the club level, so parent-coaches are not navigating it alone

For athletes, knowing that the structure around them recognises this dynamic is itself protective. The dual role becomes harder to manage when it feels like a private struggle.

Holding Both Roles Well

Parent-coaches who do this well are not the ones who pretend the dual role does not exist, or the ones who try to separate it through rigid rules. They are the ones who acknowledge it openly, talk about it with their children, accept that they will get it wrong sometimes, and prioritise the long-term relationship over the short-term performance. They are also the ones willing to ask for help, from other coaches, from sport psychologists, from clubs, rather than carrying it alone.

Sport will end. The parent-child relationship will not. The most important thing parent-coaches can hold onto, especially when the role gets hard, is which of those two relationships matters most.

References

Brown, B., & Miller, R. (2008). Proceedings of the National Symposium on Parents in Youth Sport.
Dorsch, T. E., Smith, A. L., & Dotterer, A. M. (2015). Individual, relationship, and context factors associated with parent support and pressure in organized youth sport. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 23, 132–141.
Holt, N. L., Tamminen, K. A., Black, D. E., Mandigo, J. L., & Fox, K. R. (2009). Youth sport parenting styles and practices. Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 31(1), 37–59.
Jowett, S. (2017). Coaching effectiveness: The coach-athlete relationship at its heart. Current Opinion in Psychology, 16, 154–158.
Jowett, S., Timson-Katchis, M., & Adams, R. (2014). Too close for comfort? Dependence in the dual role parent/coach,child/athlete relationship. International Journal of Coaching Science, 1(1), 59–78.
Schmid, J., Charbonnet, B., Conzelmann, A., & Zuber, C. (2020). More success with the optimal motivational pattern? A prospective longitudinal study of young athletes in individual sports. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 606927.
Weiss, M. R., & Fretwell, S. D. (2005). The parent-coach/child-athlete relationship in youth sport: Cordial, contentious, or conundrum? Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 76(3), 286–305.