My kid went 0 for 4 last Saturday. I was the assistant coach on his team. I was also his dad. Complicated set of facts to drive home with.
And I almost blew it again. He got in the car. I opened with something I thought was helpful. He didn’t say anything the rest of the day. Sunday morning he asked if he could skip practice. Monday at breakfast he said he never wanted to play baseball again. By Tuesday he was fine. But the whole week the house had a weather pattern.
The problem is the first ninety seconds.
What the window actually does
The first ninety seconds after a game decide what the next week looks like in your house. I didn’t figure that out for years. I learned it the way most of us learn things at home, by getting it wrong over and over until somebody pointed at the pattern.
In those ninety seconds your kid is asking one quiet question. Is this still a place I want to be? Not the team. The car. The relationship. You.
The answer he gets from your face and your first sentence sets the temperature for every conversation about the sport for the next seven days.
Where I keep going wrong
The recap. That second pitch you took, you knew that was a strike, right? I say it as teaching. He hears blame. The car gets quiet. The week gets quiet.
The score. Tough game. He lived the score. He doesn’t need it confirmed.
The opponent. That kid was huge. Now the opponent is bigger in his head, not smaller.
What I am trying to do instead
Three things, in this order. Short on purpose.
One. Pick a specific moment he had agency in. Not a moment that decided the score. Glad you got to bat in the fourth. Or I liked how you ran out the ground ball. Something he chose to do, not something that happened to him.
Two. Stop talking. Just for a mile. The silence does the work.
Three. Mention something else that has nothing to do with the sport. Pizza for dinner. The dog needing a walk. Did you finish the chapter for English? That sentence tells him home is bigger than the game and the game is one piece of his life, not all of it.
The longer version of this lives in our free field guide. Twenty-three scripts for before, after, and the hard moments in between. By age. Get it here.
The longer arc
Teaching does happen. Just not Saturday at 1pm. By Sunday afternoon, if the first ninety seconds go well, he brings it up himself. He’ll say something like I think I should have moved on the line drive sooner. That sentence is what good coaching at home looks like. It belongs to him.
You earned that sentence by saying almost nothing two hours after the game.
I still get at least one of those three wrong most weekends. Then I try again the next Saturday.