Some of you have kids, right? I’m not a parent myself, but I’m guessing many of you are. And if you’re not a parent, you probably have plenty of recollections and stories about what your childhood was like with your parents. One way or another, we’ve all been part of the parents-raising-kids dynamic.
 
I’ve been a high school teacher/coach for 24 years. That means I’ve worked with literally thousands of teenagers throughout my career. Obviously, when you work in a school, you’re not just dealing with the kids. You’re also dealing with their parents.
 
Not too long ago, I had an interesting conversation with a fellow coach about the delicate balance between supporting young athletes and pampering them. We’ve all heard the term “helicopter parent” in recent years, right? There’s actually a definition of it on Wikipedia that reads, “A helicopter parent is a parent who pays extremely close attention to a child's or children's experiences and problems, particularly at educational institutions. Helicopter parents are so named because, like helicopters, they "hover overhead", overseeing every aspect of their child's life constantly.”
 
If you’re a coach, helicopter parents can drive you to the brink of quitting. They refuse to stay out of the way and let coaches do their jobs. They want to be deeply involved in their kids’ athletic lives, and they frequently overstep the boundaries with coaches.
 
You probably already know this, but there’s a popular social theory these days that helicopter parenting is getting worse as decades pass by. 50 years ago, parents just enrolled their kids in sports programs, drove them to practice, sat in the bleachers and cheered them at games, etc. Nowadays, you’ve got a lot of parents who come to practice with their kids, standing off to the side of the field or in the corner of the gym, monitoring every move the kid (and the coach) makes. And if they see something they don’t like, it’s not long before they’re sticking their noses in to ask questions or “voice concerns.”
 
Let’s ask two questions at this point:
 
1) Is there anything wrong with any of this?
 
2) This is a weightlifting magazine, so what does this have to do with weightlifting?
 
The main focus of this article is the balance between supporting an athlete and babying them. One of the frequent complaints about helicopter parenting is that it prevents kids from learning to handle problems on their own. Mommy and daddy are always there to fix everything and deal with every obstacle, so how are the kids ever supposed to develop self-reliance?
 
With weightlifters, there’s always the fear that if you make things too easy for them, they’ll never toughen up. This can be true for both the parents and the coaches. Sure, you want to support young lifters. You want to make sure they have everything they need to be successful. But there’s a line somewhere. At some point, you’re not supporting the athlete anymore. You’re pampering them, and pampered athletes usually don’t become champions. They don’t have the internal toughness you need to make it to the top.
 
We want to explore where the line is between support and coddling, and how to make sure you stay on the right side of it when you’re in this position. Many of you are coaches. And even if you don’t work with youth athletes, this still applies. You can baby an adult as easily as a little kid.
 
“Thank god for humble beginnings…”
 
 That line is a quote I heard from an old friend of mine who played ten seasons in the NFL. He was born and raised in an impoverished ghetto. His family rarely had enough money for decent food and clothes. The streets of his neighborhood were violent and dangerous. In short, he grew up the hard way. And it made him into a tough person, which made him a successful football player. The pain and difficulty of the football field was nothing compared to the environment he lived in every day as a kid.
 
We’ve all heard stories like this. Great athletes often come from ghetto backgrounds. The hardships of their upbringing make them resilient, and their motivation to be successful is 10 times higher than most people because they know what their life will be like if they fail. This is one of the main reasons why Olympic weightlifting has historically been dominated by countries where the standards of living for the average citizen are miserable. To illustrate this, let me share an excerpt from my book Drugs in Olympic Weightlifting:
 
“To fully understand the big picture, we need to return to the old Communist Era of the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries. Back in this time (1950s-1980s), communist governments used sports success to demonstrate the strength of their nations and the superiority of their way of life. Athletics were a primary public relations tool. Because of this, these governments pumped vast amounts of money and resources into their sports programs. Alexander Kurlovich, who we have already mentioned, was one of the premiere Soviet weightlifters of the 1980s. Kurlovich trained in a program called the Sports Clubs of the Soviet Ministry of Defense (SKA), which was basically a sports wing of the Soviet army. Here, athletes could train full-time and receive the same benefits of the country’s armed forces. Food, housing, and military-level pay were some of the perks. Many of the greatest Soviet athletes of the Cold War Era were members of this program. Similar systems were established in the other Communist countries of Eastern Europe.
 
This was during a time period when the standard of living for the average citizen in Europe was often impoverished and limited. By the time communism collapsed in 1990, the Per Capita GDP in the United States was over $23,000, compared to average figures around $6,000 in most Eastern Bloc countries. Average people lived in squalor, while sports champions were well taken care of. In other words, becoming a successful weightlifter could be the ticket out of a life of labor, starvation, and economic bleakness.
 
So, for several decades, a system was established where there was tremendous financial opportunity for weightlifters in these countries. In addition to the upper-level programs like the SKA, sport development academies were built and funded by the government, giving athletes the chance to start training at young ages and pursue the opportunity to become world champions. Children were recommended or specially selected for these schools, and once they were enrolled, their sport became their government job. If they continued to improve, they worked their way up in the national sport system with continued financial support.”
 
Life in Eastern Europe during the second half of the 20^th century was rough. Helicopter parenting? Forget about it. Dad had to spend all day working in a salt mine, while mom spent the day at home trying to scrape together meals and clothes for the family. When a kid got an opportunity to be a weightlifter, that was probably going to be their only shot at a better life. Former Olympic champion Nicu Vlad from Romania summarized this idea when he said, “In Romania, I train on a bar that is bent. My gym has bad lighting and very little heat in the winters. Here in America, you have everything you need to train. It’s not in the bar or the gym or the platform…it’s in you.”
 
In other words, great athletes are always tough people, and people become tough when they have to deal with tough circumstances. THIS is the main reason why athletes shouldn’t be coddled and babied. You don’t turn into a block of iron by being pampered and stroked.
 
So, should we move to the ghetto?
 
This is where the dilemma comes in. Whether you’re a parent raising a kid or a coach training an athlete, you want to give them the best possible shot at being successful. That means you want them to have the best coaching, the best equipment, the best facilities, etc.
 
If you have the financial resources to provide these things, you’re going to do it. But now you’ve got a situation where the athletes are training in the lap of luxury. They’ve got the shiny gyms, the expensive bars and bumpers, the whole nine yards. How are they supposed to experience a tough upbringing when their environments are…pretty damn nice? As boxing legend Marvin Hagler once said, “It’s hard to get up at 5:00am to do roadwork when you sleep in silk sheets.”
 
I once saw a movie about a famous actress who started her life in poverty and eventually made it to the fame and riches of Hollywood. Her daughter was raised in this wealthy life, which turned her into a lazy, drug-using brat. There’s a great scene in the movie where the actress tells her daughter, “I came from nothing, and I made something of my life. You come from something, and you’re trying to make your life into nothing.”
 
We get it. If you have a successful life, you can’t exactly send your kids away to a boarding school in the ghetto so they can fight in the streets and develop the toughness to become a championship athlete. If you’re a coach, you want to have a nice gym. You don’t want to deliberately turn it into a scum hole just to make your athletes deal with rough conditions. Long story short, how can you cultivate internal toughness in your athletes and provide them with the best resources at the same time?
 
The answer lies in two areas: attitude and approach. It’s entirely possible to train an athlete like a barbarian in a million-dollar gym. Let’s look at it this way:
 
Think about some of the hardest workouts you’ve ever had. The ones that punished you, mentally and physically. The ones where you had to reach down deep into your soul and find a new level of courage and resilience. The ones where you basically had to fight to the death. Now, ask yourself these questions: Did it matter how fancy the gym was during those workouts? Did you squeeze those amazing performances out of yourself because the gym had holes in the walls and rusty faucets in the bathroom? Of course not. When it comes down to the nitty gritty battle between you and the barbell, your surroundings don’t really matter. Neither does your expensive car or the fancy entertainment center in your living room.
 
At the end of the day, you conquered those hellacious workouts for two reasons:
1) You had animal hunger in your heart to be victorious
2) You probably had a coach who pushed the hell out of you and encouraged the hell out of you at the same time
 
This is the answer to the riddle
 
Yes, tough environments often breed tough people. Yes, kids usually have a stronger chance of being spoiled brats if they get life’s little luxuries spoon fed to them.
 
But despite any of that stuff, we have to remember that courage, toughness, and determination are the basic requisites for being a successful athlete, and they don’t have to come from external factors. When you work with young athletes as long as I have, there’s one undeniable fact you learn: some people are just wired differently. You might not even be able to explain it or pinpoint the reason for it. I’ve coached kids who were hard charging little terminators who would outwork anybody and spill their guts to win a competition…and they came from wealthy families.
 
There’s no 2+2=4 equation when it comes to the development of mental strength and toughness.
 
Plus, we have to remember that people can have tough upbringings even if they come from privileged environments. Just because your parents are rich doesn’t mean you’re not going to grow up the hard way. Think about that little girl who grows up alone in her room, picked on at school, wanting somebody’s approval but never getting it. Her daddy is a lawyer and she has all the finest things in life, but she doesn’t have the things in her heart she wants the most. And then she finds weightlifting…
 
I can tell you from experience, that little girl will probably be the hardest worker you’ve ever seen. She’ll bust her ass every day because she just wants to be good at something. She wants recognition. She wants to feel like she’s not a loser. And if she has a caring coach who pushes her to the max and believes in her at the same time, you might just wind up with a champion on your hands.
 
I’ve seen this story many times, my friends. So, as we continue on in our journeys as parents, coaches, or whatever…let’s not make up our minds about anybody based on external factors or background. People need to be pushed hard and supported hard at the same time. That’s the magic combination.