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 cancelled because there's nobody left to run them.

Here's the thing though.

The Tasering is not the problem.

It's the most visible version of the problem. The extreme end of something that starts much, much quieter.

It starts with a groan when your child misses a shot.

A long silence in the car on the way home.

A question that sounds innocent — "Why didn't you just pass it?" — that lands like a verdict.

A look.

That's where it starts.

Harvard psychologist Richard Weissbourd — who contributed to the Slate piece — put it plainly: parents who view their child's sport as a ticket to a better future are the most likely to lose perspective. The stakes feel too high to stay calm. And children feel that weight whether it's expressed as a Tasering or as a quiet, disappointed sigh.

Research shows that kids don't separate the two.

Both tell them the same thing.

That your presence at their game comes with conditions.

That they're performing for your approval, not playing for themselves.

And once that shift happens — once sport becomes something they do for you rather than for the love of it — the confidence that was supposed to come from it starts going the other way.

I've sat with parents who are nothing like the ones in that Slate article. Good parents. Present parents. Parents who drove an hour each way to every game for three years.

And their kids still felt it.

Not because those parents were behaving badly.

Because nobody had ever given them a framework for what their child actually needed from them in those moments.

That's the gap.

If you want the framework — what to say, when to say nothing, and how to become the presence on the sideline your child genuinely draws confidence from — that's exactly what The Unshakeable Kid walks you through.

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Coach Mick