INSIGHT
Strategies for Parents to Cope With Competition Stress.
How praise, language, and the narrative you tell around climbing can quietly build or chip away at your child's confidence and motivation.
QUICK TAKEAWAY:
The kind of praise you give your child can matter as much as how often you give it.
➤ Praising effort, strategy, and persistence tends to build resilience. Praising talent or outcome alone can create pressure to protect an image.
➤ What you say after a fall or a disappointing comp can shape how your child interprets difficulty for years to come.
➤ Validating emotions first, before moving to problem-solving, is often more helpful than immediately reframing.
➤ Harsh self-talk in young athletes, like "I suck", "I'll never get this", can be a signal worth paying attention to, not brushing past.
➤ You don't need to find the perfect words. Shifting your attention from outcome to process is enough to start.
You've probably felt it: that surge of pride when your child tops a project they've been working on for weeks. And something comes out of your mouth, warm and immediate: "You're amazing. That was incredible." And honestly? It was.
But there may be a more powerful way to respond in that moment. One that doesn't just celebrate the success, but actually shapes how your child begins to see themselves as a climber. Not just today, but across the years of falls, plateaus, breakthroughs, and frustrating comps that lie ahead.
The research in sport psychology is fairly consistent on this point: the kind of praise children receive can matter enormously for how they respond to challenge and failure. And in a sport like climbing — where, as Janja Garnbret has said, 99% of the time you're not succeeding — that relationship with difficulty is everything.
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Why the type of praise you give matters.
Psychologist Carol Dweck's work on what she calls Mindset Theory offers a helpful starting point. When children are consistently praised for being talented – "You're a natural", "You're just so good at this" – they can start to build an identity around that talent. And identity, it turns out, is a fragile thing to hang your confidence on.
If being naturally gifted is who you are, then struggling, falling, or failing a route doesn't just feel uncomfortable. It can start to feel like a threat to the story of who you are. Over time, this may lead some children to quietly avoid challenges that might expose them, to give up sooner when things get hard, or to feel disproportionately upset when results don't meet expectations.
Children who are more often praised for effort, persistence, and process – for what they did rather than who they are – tend to respond differently to setbacks. They're more likely to see difficulty as part of the work, not evidence of a ceiling. They may be more willing to try routes they'll fall off, to ask for feedback, to stay curious about what went wrong.
In climbing, this difference can show up in subtle but important ways: the child who refuses to try a boulder they're not sure about, versus the one who wants to understand why they keep falling at the crux. Both might be equally talented. But their relationship with difficulty may look very different.
What this can look like in practice
The shift from outcome-focused to process-focused praise doesn't have to be dramatic. It's often a small adjustment in where you direct your attention.
Instead of "You're so talented", you might try: "I noticed how many times you changed your beta before it finally worked. That patience is what got you up."
Instead of "You always do so well", something like: "The way you stayed calm after that big fall and just kept working the sequence, that's not easy to do."
Instead of "You're the best on your team", perhaps: "You've put in a lot of consistent work this season. I think that's starting to show."
The distinction is in what you're pointing to. One type of praise says you are: it reinforces an identity. The other says you did: it reinforces a process. And when the hard days come, which they will, the child who's learned that effort and strategy are what matter has something more useful to fall back on than a label they're not sure they can live up to.
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What happens when things don't go as planned.
When a comp doesn't go the way your child hoped, the temptation is often to move quickly past the difficult feeling: to reassure, to minimise, to pivot straight to what comes next. "Don't worry, you're still the best." Or to stay quiet, hoping the tension will pass without needing to be addressed.
These reactions tend to come from a genuinely good place. Watching your child struggle emotionally is uncomfortable. You want to help. But research suggests that children often benefit more from having their experience acknowledged than from having it resolved immediately.
Something like: "It's okay to feel disappointed. I could see how much you cared about this and how much you put into each round today." ...followed, when the moment is right, by something more reflective: "What do you think you'll take from today?" "Is there anything you'd want to try differently next time?"
This kind of response does two things at once. It validates the emotion, which tends to help children regulate faster than bypassing it does, and it gently moves attention toward learning and agency, rather than leaving the experience as simply something that went wrong.
It doesn't always land perfectly. And that's okay.
When the inner voice turns harsh.
Pay attention to how your child talks about themselves after a hard session or a disappointing result. Not just the big moments — the quiet throwaway comments too. "I suck." "I'll never be good at this." "Why do I even bother?"
This kind of self-talk isn't always just venting. In some cases, it can be a window into what a child has actually started to believe about themselves. And left unaddressed over time, it may contribute to anxiety, disengagement from the sport, or a pattern of avoidance that can be hard to trace back to its source.
When you hear it, the instinct might be to immediately counter it: "That's not true, you're amazing." But this can sometimes feel dismissive, like the emotion isn't being taken seriously.
A gentler approach might be to mirror it first: "It sounds like you're being really hard on yourself right now."
And then, when there's a little more space: "What would you say to a teammate who felt exactly the way you're feeling?"
That question, simple as it sounds, can open something. Children are often far more compassionate toward their friends than toward themselves. And having that pointed out can shift the inner conversation in ways that direct reassurance sometimes doesn't.
A NOTE WORTH SITTING WITH: One young climber described feeling like her parents were warmer and more relaxed after good results and quieter, more distant after disappointing ones. Whether or not that was ever the intention, it was the meaning she took from it. Children are often reading these patterns long before anyone realises.
What process-focused parenting can sound like over time.
Shifting toward a more process-focused approach isn't something that happens in a single conversation. It tends to be something that builds gradually: through small moments, repeated across car rides and training sessions and post-comp evenings on the couch.
Some questions that can open more useful conversations:
➤ "What felt different today compared to last time?"
➤ "What's one thing you worked out up there that you didn't know before?"
➤ "What do you want to focus on in the next training block?"
➤ "What would you want to try if you knew it was okay to fall off it?"
These aren't magic scripts. They're a direction. A way of showing your child, over time, that what you're most interested in isn't the number on the scoreboard. It's what they're learning, how they're thinking, and who they're becoming in the process.
That, more than almost anything else you can do, may be what helps them stay curious, motivated, and resilient across the long arc of their climbing life.
Final thoughts for climbing parents.
You don't need to get every word right. And it's worth saying clearly: occasional outcome-focused praise isn't going to undo a child's confidence. The patterns over time are what tend to matter most and the fact that you're thinking about this at all puts you in a strong position.
If you take one thing from this: the next time your child finishes a route, try to notice something specific about how they got there. Not just that they did. That small shift in attention from result to process is often where the most important parenting happens.
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