To start, we want to make sure that we're on the same page. Our goal for kids is to set them up for success. To us, that means 

• They are safe while grappling
• They have fun grappling
• They get good at grappling
• They treat others with respect
• They develop social skills
• They develop communication skills

To that point, the most important thing that I can communicate to you is that grappling is just a game. This might sound a little trivial, but it will really guide everything else here. If you only get one thing from this, it should be to treat grappling like a game - because it is one.

1: It’s just a game

I got asked a few months ago by a parent how to navigate his kid wanting to grapple at home with his friend. His question was “How do I make sure that it’s treated like a martial art and not just two kids play-wrestling in the backyard”.

I told him that he SHOULD treat it like two kids play-wrestling in the backyard!

If you want your kid to make grappling or any other sport a lifelong pursuit, treat it like a fun game

If you want your kid to get good at grappling, treat it like a fun game

Most importantly, If you want your kid to be happy, treat it like a fun game

You’ve probably heard the saying “For the love of the game”.

I love grappling. It’s nice to get submissions, but I don’t need to get submissions or even win positionally to love the game.

I love having silly goals when I’m playing like trying to trap peoples arms behind their back with my legs. I love exploring new positions that I’m bad at - currently, that’s upside down back control. I even love it when I lose to people that are a lot more talented than I am and trying to learn from it.

If you want your child to get good at grappling, they need to love the game too - whether they win or they lose.

That brings us to point number 2.

2: Don’t talk to your kids during class

We’ll talk about being in class more in a minute, but if you are in the room with your kids while they’re grappling, don’t coach them!
This is so detrimental to the development of your kid (and other kids in the room) that we reserve the right to ban parents from practice for talking to their kids during class. 

Before we even talk about why interacting with your kids during practice is harmful, we need to start by making sure that we're on the same page. I can empathize with how hard it is to watch a kid playing a game that they're not winning. I can empathize with wanting them to improve at the game - getting them good at grappling is my job and my third top priority as a coach. I have spent thousands of hours watching students grapple and when I watch them I always have part of me wanting to intervene to fix mistakes. Even though I know that they will improve more in the long run by maximizing the time they spend playing and problem solving, I still struggle with the urge to step in and try to correct all the mistakes I see every day in the gym. It is hard to not indulge this urge, even though I know that it is on the whole counterproductive. When I am asking you to not intervene during practice, it is the same ask that I make of myself and other coaches at Golden Jiu Jitsu. 

I normally see two types of interactions from parents:

• telling their kid how to win
• trying to tell their kid to ‘behave’ in class

We’re going to talk about both of these.

When you try to tell your kid what to do to win - like “go for the triangle” or “get up” or “use your right arm” it does two negative things

• 1: It increase the chance that they stop loving the game
• 2: It prevents them from learning

When parents coach kids mid rounds, it often enforces the idea of winning vs losing. They either manage to do what you say - a win - or they don’t, and they lose.

The gym is a place for skill development, not a competition. It puts pressure on them to win, and they’re not going to always win. It ups the ante on losses and leads to them losing their love for the game.

Encourage them for trying, encourage them for having fun and being kind to others, but don’t encourage them for winning - our egos do enough to encourage winning as it is. 

As far as preventing them from learning, there’s six main reasons:

• 1: You're distracting them

• 2: It's changing the social dynamic in the room

• 3: It's denying them the opportunity to problem solve

• 4: It's adding unnecessary pressure

• 5: It breaks consistency in the language of feedback

• 6: It's likely not the best advice

• 1: Distractions - talking to them is preventing them from focusing on playing the game and learning:

  Grappling is a highly chaotic and nonlinear game. Because of this, heuristics are normally the best tool we have for learning and playing. There are some positions that are more stable which leads to systems approaches being a valuable tool in learning, but even then without good heuristics these systems often fall apart. A good example is a late stage arm bar from spiderweb.

  Some heuristics I could give for this position would be to keep my training partners back on the floor, maintain hip to shoulder connection, achieve 3 point connection on the arm with their shoulder elbow and hand, use their arm as a ratchet lever, breaking their spinal alignment, or preventing their legs from effectively basing against the direction of my attacks.

  These are the things I think about when going for an arm bar. What I focus on is constantly changing as my training partner gives me new problems to solve - like them trying to increase the framing ability of the far arm or trap my leg or shift their base around. It changes when they adjust their grips or effectively base or create space around my hips and I’m always ready to switch to a defensive cycle or try to transition to other positions.

  Systems wise, I use 6 main leg configurations, several hand configurations, a bunch of various grip types, 5 main transitions I’m looking for, etc.. I could talk about pros and cons for each of these, signs I look for as to what I should be attempting to attack and a lot more.

  This might seem like a lot, but I could add so so so much more. To give some insight into how deep in the weeds we could go, my favorite arm bar instructional is over 8 hours long. Heck I could even talk about benefits of that instructional vs pure ecological approach vs lachlan giles content, etc..

  So, when your kid is playing in a spiderweb arm bar position, the goal for them is to stay focused on the very complicated problems that are in front of them, and preferably on heuristics that will help them solve those problems. These tasks and heuristics change in a split second as the position evolves and both players move around.

  When you tell your kid what to do, it’s taking their head out of the game and causing them to focus on you instead. I can empathize with wanting to help someone when you see them struggling with something, but I promise you that it does more harm than good. 

• Social Dynamics: Sports of all kinds are an incredible tool for people of all ages to develop and improve social skills. It's frustrating to lose and we learn how to handle loss and failure constructively. Being a good winner that doesn't rub things in other peoples faces is also a learned skill. There's a balance between going too easy and not being a fun training partner and going too hard and not being a fun training partner. There will be frustrations over feeling like other kids don't want to play with you if you are not a fun training partner - and different kids will have different preferences so we will never be everyone's preferred training partner. Kids will test boundaries of coaches and other kids and will develop skills recognizing how to interact with others in a constructive way.
  
  These are all good things. When parents interact with children during class, it denies kids opportunities to learn these lessons. It changes the ways in which kids interact with each others. There are already multiple complex social interactions that they are learning to navigate with other kids and coaches. Adding an even more complex one by interacting with them in front of their peers does not improve the situation. Forcing kids to navigate the situation of their training partners parent interacting with them is not fair to them and we should not put that burden on children.
  

• Problem solvers: This is encapsulated well with the saying - give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime. We want to create adaptive problem solvers, not rote repetition regurgitators. They will go further if they predominantly learn through self play and discovery with a limited set of problems vs being given solutions. A coaches fundamental job is to develop ways in which to give athletes problems that are an appropriate difficulty for an athletes skill level along with tools to solve those problems.

• Pressure: When you put pressure on anyone to win, they’re going to be more likely to stick with stuff that they know works. That’s great for competition, but terrible for the training room. Their goal should be to explore positions and play the game - key word being play. Like I said earlier, it’s just a game. They will learn more in the long run if they are willing to explore new ideas and strategies - including many that will not work. I see vastly faster rates of improvement from athletes of all ages that play around compared to athletes that only care about winning in the training room. 

• The language of feedback: Internal language is the most common thing I hear from parents but it’s the least effective type of communication for sports learning - put your arm here, move your leg like that. External language has much higher retention and impact - keep their head off the ground, keep their elbow across their chest. Metaphors have the highest effectiveness - an example of this is something I say pretty often - “T-Rexes don’t tap”.

• It’s likely not good advice: If you haven’t studied and played the game extensively - aka you’re at least a purple belt - then it’s very very likely that much of the coaching you’d be giving them isn’t good advice. You might be telling them to break the grip, but in reality they should be focused on preventing the escape. Learning concepts and movement pathways is hard. Recognizing which pathway or concept an athlete should be focused on is even harder. Also, our primary inputs for recognizing what movement paths we should pursue is often based on touch, sense of balance, etc.. that is mostly imperceptible by sight. 

So those are all reasons why you shouldn’t be trying to coach your kid on how to win. The other reason I see parents talk to kids is to tell their kid to behave.

The most succinct way to say this is that when parents do this it does more harm than good.

A longer way to say it is that if I’m not worried about their behavior in class you probably shouldn’t be either. There’s a certain base level of playing around that I actually encourage. Grappling is a game. If they’re too serious they’re not going to have fun and they’ll burn out. Heck, I’m never serious in classes and I’m always playing around.

I have expectations of kids to be respectful to each other and to me, but I have zero expectations for them to be serious. We’re playing a game.

Kids class is a great opportunity for kids to develop social skills. The best tool to get kids to “behave” in class is the innate desire to want to be liked and to fit in. When I notice that a kid isn’t paying attention when I’m giving instructions I’ll say “waiting on one” or “waiting on two” to give them a chance to focus in. Instead of shaming them in front of other kids, it essentially gets them to semi enforce paying attention with each other and give them a reminder of the expectations from me in class.

Sometimes kids will be playing around with something other than what I gave them as instructions for the game. To a certain degree, that’s for them to work out between them and their training partner. If both kids are having fun they’re learning how to move their bodies and play, then most of the time I’m okay with it.

If their training partner is frustrated and wants to play the game, then I’ll generally give them space to communicate that and give the other child the space to receive that positively and start working on the game. When that’s not the case, I’ll normally tell a kid something to the effect of “hey you’re not playing the game and it’s not fun for your training partner” and give them space to self correct. If none of that works or it starts becoming more systemic, then I’ll resort to burpees or having a one on one conversation with them about it.

When parents speak to their kid in class about their behavior it bypasses all of this, prevents them from developing social skills in that setting and more. If your kid is behaving in a way that’s detrimental to the development of other children, I promise that I will communicate that to you. If your worried about the development of your kid in class, please talk to a coach instead of your kid. 

3: Kids seem to do best when their parents aren’t always there

I’ve coached kids for years, and I’ve noticed that kids who’s parents always stay tend to do worse over time.

I’m not sure if it’s the ability to develop social skills in an environment where they’re not worried about their parent getting on to them, if there’s a correlation between doing worse and parents taking grappling super seriously, or something else, but when parent’s are there for every class kids seem to do worse. Take it with a grain of salt, but I’d recommend leaving your kid to be a kid with other kids at least some of the time. 

4: Frustration is normal, especially for beginners:

Kids have big feelings and sometimes struggle to express them. A lot of adults do too. That’s normal. It’s normal for kids to get frustrated when they lose a game. I’ve seen full grown adults throw temper tantrums because they lose a card game. 

That’s 10x as true for a game like grappling, where we’re trying to in a sense physically control someone else’s body. Having someone hold you down, control your body, and not be able to do anything about it is a frustrating experience for anyone of any age. Handling those emotions constructively is a learned skill and it takes time.

When kids lash out at each other because they’re mad a coach will step in. I’ll tell them that I’m not mad at them, but that behavior is not whatsoever acceptable in the gym. It takes time to learn the “rules” of the social setting and what is expected. I’ll normally give them an option of getting water or taking a few laps to give them time to process how they feel.

In the same vein, a lot of kids will act like they’re injured when they lose. That is normal too and is a coping mechanism for dealing with failure and loss. I’ll step in occasionally when I see this happening and try to call attention to what is actually happening.

5: Never use grappling as a punishment:

This might sound silly, but I’ve seen it a lot. I’ve heard parents say stuff like “if you don’t work hard you’re going to drill these later”. It just leads to burn out. Grappling is a game. If they don’t want to work hard it’s normally a symptom of not having fun and being burnt out. Pushing them harder leads to worse outcomes.

6: If you want to grapple outside of the gym, make sure it’s fun!

Some people have mats at their house or grapple in their backyard. If you’re one of these parent’s, make sure its fun!! I avoid static drilling and solo drills in the gym at all costs. You should too! Play time is play time. To that effect, if you’re not an intermediate level grappler or higher, I’d be very careful about playing at home. Grappling safely is a learned skill. Grappling safely with tiny people is even more difficult.

7: If your kid wants to compete, proceed with caution

Some kids are more competitive than others. That’s normal.

If they reach a point where they want to be more competitive - which normally won’t happen until at least 12/13 years old, then it’s totally fine for them to compete. I cannot stress this enough, but I wouldn’t push them to win in competition for a good while. Their first few competitions should be completely devoid of pressure from anyone - parents or coaches. It’s just an experience for them, not serious.

I’d make sure that they actually want to compete. Is it something they want to do, or is it something that they thing a parent or coach wants? If it’s for any other reason than them wanting it, they shouldn’t compete.

If they’ve been competing - as in done at like at least 3 competitions - and they want to do better then it’s okay to look at how to get them to improve their results. The absolute best way I know is to have a parent make a written contract with their kid. This contract

• Was for a finite amount of time that wasn’t too long - just a few months
• Didn’t have to be signed by the kid. The deal was that there was no pressure for them to sign, but if they did
• Gave their parent permission to be hard on their kid only for the duration of the contract
• They had to train ___ times per week
• Had to jog ____ per week

In summary, if you want your kid to have fun, get good at grappling, and develop social/communication skills, the best way to do it is to treat it like a fun game & don't let yourself talk to them during class. Everything else basically comes down to those two things.