“As a parent, you’re not the coach, you’re their biggest fan,” said PGA qualified golf coach Jack Backhouse about parent’s involvement in junior golf.
Young people should find golf to be fun, I think we can all agree on that. After all, so many of us play the game because we enjoy it and juniors are no different.
But as more children are introduced to the game through academies, coaching programmes, and other competitive pathways, experts believe the line between encouragement and pressure can get blurred, often unintentionally.
A lot of this blame can frequently lie at the hands of parents of junior golfers.
Speaking on the Your Golf by NCG podcast, Backhouse and host Tom Irwin discussed one of the most delicate issues in junior golf; overly pushy parents.
Overcoaching
“I think that this kind of the idea of constant feedback is a massive problem,” said Irwin.
“If you’re a child, your entire time, you spend your entire life being told what to do. So you go to school and someone tells you how to add up, someone tells you how to make letters shaped properly.
“So you’ve got all of that sort of formalized learning. Then you’ve got kind of like constant learning about things that are life skills, like how to tie shoelaces or how to brush your teeth.
“You’re constantly being told about this stuff. And then nowadays, and I’m as guilty of this for anyone, there’s been this sort of professionalization of children’s sport.
“So when they go to golf and they go to cricket and they go to football, it’s supposed to be fun, fundamentally. But actually, it’s just becoming more time when they’re being told what to do. And I think that’s made worse by overzealous people like me, who constantly saying on that specific swing.”
