Your child is capable. They just don't believe it yet. I'm Mick — Myotherapist, running coach, and the person parents come to when encouragement isn't working anymore. I help parents of anxious, low-confidence kids (ages 8–16) build real, lasting self-belief — through movement mastery, not more therapy or pep talks. Sign up for my free 4-part video series of practical tools for raising a kid who backs themselves when it counts.
Norway bans scores in kids' sport. Then wins the Olympics.
|
Norway just broke the all-time Winter Olympics record. 41 medals at the 2026 Milan-Cortina Games. Three consecutive Olympic medal table victories. The most dominant run in modern sports history. And their secret? They removed all pressure from children's sport. No scores until age 13. No league standings. No national titles for kids. Parents are fined for posting youth results online. The whole system is built around one idea — that children should play because they love it. Not because someone is counting. Here's what hits me about this. Most parents I talk to genuinely believe pressure motivates. They believe that if their child doesn't feel the stakes, they won't try. So the stakes get raised. The feedback gets louder. The car rides home get longer. The expectations get clearer. And slowly, quietly — the kid stops loving it. Not all at once. It happens over years. One rolled eye on the sideline. One "you know you could have tried harder" in the car. One look of disappointment after a loss. Research from sports psychologists at The Guardian showed that children with high-pressure parents actually produce physical anxiety responses during competition — muscle tension, racing heart, disrupted breathing. Not more effort. More fear. They don't perform better under that pressure. They perform worse. And eventually they stop showing up at all. 70% of kids drop out of sport by age 13. Norway looks at that number differently to the rest of the world. They don't see a motivation problem. They see a joy problem. And they fixed it by removing the external pressure — and letting the internal love of movement lead. The result is a generation of athletes who compete because they want to. Who train because it's fun. Who show up to the hard sessions because nobody took the joy out of it early. That's not an accident. That's what happens when a child gets to own their relationship with movement. If your child is in sport right now — whether they're thriving or starting to pull back — the single most powerful thing you can do this week isn't to find a better coach or a harder program. It's to ask yourself one question: What does my child see when they look over at me from the field? That look shapes everything. Coach Mick P.S. If you want a framework for exactly how to be the parent your child needs in those moments — without rescuing them, without pushing them, and without accidentally making it worse — that's exactly what The Unshakeable Kid covers. It's $47 and you can grab it here:
|
Natural Born Running
Your child is capable. They just don't believe it yet. I'm Mick — Myotherapist, running coach, and the person parents come to when encouragement isn't working anymore. I help parents of anxious, low-confidence kids (ages 8–16) build real, lasting self-belief — through movement mastery, not more therapy or pep talks. Sign up for my free 4-part video series of practical tools for raising a kid who backs themselves when it counts.
There's a sentence I keep hearing from parents. Not in a dramatic way. Not in a cry-for-help way. Just quietly, at the end of a conversation, almost as an aside. "He's used to it by now." And I think about that sentence a lot. Because what they're actually describing is a nine, ten, eleven-year-old who has already stopped expecting more from themselves. They tried. They fell short. It happened enough times that their brain made a decision — this is just how it is for me. And the scary thing?...
That number comes from a survey of students at high-achieving schools across the US. Researcher Jennifer Breheny Wallace spent years studying what she calls "toxic achievement culture" — the environment where performance becomes the lens through which children understand their own worth. And the finding that stopped me wasn't the anxiety statistics. It wasn't the burnout numbers. It was that one. 70% of kids believe their parents value them more when they succeed. Not know. Believe. These...
A parent was Tasered on the sideline of a middle school basketball game. Not a fight outside a pub. A 12-year-old's basketball game. Slate Magazine investigated the trend last month. Police called to under-12s games. Adults throwing punches at school football. Parents screaming at teenage referees until they cried and quit. A 2023 survey found 68% of referees say fan sportsmanship is getting worse year on year. The US has lost 50,000 officials since 2019. In some regions, games are being...