Push them hard. Watch them quit.

British sailing coach Dom Barnes offers this reminder for parents with youth sailors:

I watched a parent rig their kid’s boat while impatiently telling the kid not to touch it and to go and get changed instead. It wasn’t about helping or saving time. The message was pretty clear: I’ve spent a lot of money on this, don’t mess it up.

Then this tiny human emerges from the changing room in a drysuit two sizes too big and the parent’s parting words are not to come off the water unless they’ve won.

That has stuck with me, because somewhere in that moment the sailing had stopped being about the child enjoying the day, learning something, and finding out what they could do, and had become about delivering a result for the adult standing on the shore.

There’s a Class of boat I won’t coach. I’m not going to name it, and you can have a guess, but I’ll tell you the reason clearly enough: it isn’t the boat, which I actually rate, and it isn’t the kids, most of whom are brilliant, funny, hungry to learn and exactly the sort of sailors you want to spend a Saturday with. It’s the parents.

Not all of them, because there are some genuinely wonderful exceptions, but enough of them stand on that shore treating a nine-year-old’s race like their own unfinished business that I’ve stopped going near the fleet, even when I’ve been asked directly.

And yes, that Class produces some very good sailors. Nobody’s arguing with the results. What I do wonder about is how many potentially good sailors we lose along the way, because a talented ten-year-old who gets shouted at for finishing third doesn’t always become a more determined thirteen-year-old. Sometimes they just decide that sailing isn’t much fun anymore.

I think quite a few sailing parents confuse wanting the best for their child with needing something from them. Wanting the best is completely understandable because love, worry, pride and ambition all get tangled together, especially when you know your child has talent. Needing the result, though, is different, because then the child’s race starts becoming a way of satisfying something in the parent.

So, the question I think every parent of a young racer should occasionally ask themselves is a simple one: are you cheering for your kid, or through them?