The match is over. The bag goes in the boot, the seatbelts click, and the car pulls out of the club. Somewhere in the first five minutes a parent who loves their child, has paid the entry fee and watched every point asks a perfectly reasonable question: what happened to your backhand in the second set? The child looks out of the window. The rest of the journey is quiet, and not the comfortable kind.
Researchers have now spent real time inside those cars, sometimes with cameras running. What they found is less about forbidden phrases than about timing, ownership and how much a parent talks.
What actually happens in the car
A Canadian team filmed 98 car journeys, about 30 hours in total, by 28 parent and child pairs from several youth sports. Talk about sport took up surprisingly little of it: 12.9% of the time, against 28.5% for other topics and 59.0% for silence. Parents asked closed questions most often and open, reflective ones least often. Roughly half the time after a parent praised, expressed confidence or suggested an improvement, they “interjected or did not allow athletes to respond”.
An earlier study by the same lead author, based on interviews with 27 young athletes and their parents, showed how differently children experience the same drive. Some treated it “as something to endure”, while others enjoyed it “as an opportunity to debrief with their parent.” The children’s requests were simple. One asked for space: “If I’m feeling down or not happy, I would really appreciate it if my mom gave me some space and some time to let me think about it.” Another had a more specific request: “can you start with something positive?”
Research in Australian football points to a gap in perception as well. Youth players experienced their parents’ comments “in polarising ways”, while parents tended to “rationalise their own verbal behaviour”. The person talking and the person listening often remember the same conversation differently.
What tennis families showed
Most of that research comes from team sports, but there is now a study of tennis itself. Researchers recorded 13 British tennis families on the way home from competition, 4 hours and 26 minutes of conversation with children aged 8 to 18. When parents tried to review the performance by “highlighting problems or areas for improvement”, the children resisted or disengaged. When the children raised their own performance and the parents went along with it, long and warm conversations followed, “irrespective of the result or outcome.”
That last phrase matters. A good conversation after a loss was possible. What made the difference was who opened the subject, and the parent’s job is to notice that opening when it comes and follow it rather than take over.
The same study adds an important caveat for younger players. Parents of younger children “may have to play a more active role in initiating and structuring the ‘debriefing process’ by asking genuinely open questions.” An eight-year-old may never bring it up, so for them the parent’s job is to ask an open question and then listen.
What junior players say they want
When 42 junior tennis players aged 12 to 15 were asked what they wanted from their parents, the answers were clear. They did not want to be criticised for performance after a match, but they did want feedback on effort and attitude, “even if the feedback was critical.” They also liked parents who helped them “prepare for and recover from their matches”. The one exception was technical or tactical advice from parents who were tennis coaches themselves or had played at a high level.
A larger study in the UK, with players, former players, parents and coaches, showed how much depends on context. One player put it simply: “It’s good to be debriefed a bit, but it depends. If I’ve lost badly I don’t like being debriefed, I just want to calm down a bit”. The authors suggest parents consider “the importance of the tournament, how the child anticipated doing, the child’s perception of their performance, and the actual outcome.” Another player described the simplest fix of all: “I said to them that I don’t like talking about it and they never talked about it again”.
Effort deserves some care too. The tennis car ride study warns that when a child has tried hard, encouraging them to put a defeat down to a lack of effort “can be disheartening”.
What the governing bodies advise
The LTA’s competition parenting course summarises its advice after the match as “allowing your child to own the time when they wanted to talk about the match on their terms.” Its guide on mental and emotional skills offers questions for when that time comes, such as “what did you do well?”, “what did you find difficult?” and “what could you have done differently?”, followed by a reminder: “Ideally, they should be doing most of the talking!”
USTA guidance for junior tennis parents says much the same in fewer words: “Give your child time to recover after a match before talking to them about it”, “Avoid extensive post match critiques”, and, for older players, “Stay out of coaching/technical analysis of game”.
About “I love to watch you play”
Many parents have heard that the best thing to say after any game is “I love to watch you play.” The phrase comes from two former coaches, Bruce Brown and Rob Miller, who spent years informally asking athletes about their experiences with their parents. A 2012 article describes their work as “an informal survey” lasting three decades, and the two coaches did not consider themselves experts. It is a kind and sensible sentence, not a research finding. The more useful advice in the same article is Brown’s: “Let your child bring the game to you if they want to.”
A simple plan for the drive
None of the studies offers a script that has been tested and proven. Taken together, they point to a plan that is easy to follow:
- Start with care, not analysis: a drink, food, how the body feels.
- Say one true, positive thing about effort or attitude, and resist adding “but”.
- Let the child open the subject of the match. With younger children, ask one open question and then listen.
- Leave technique and tactics to the coach, unless you are the coach.
- Agree on your “rules of the road” in advance, as the 2017 study suggests, at a time when nobody has just lost a match.
- Let silence be silence. In the filmed journeys it filled most of the time.
If a conversation about the match does start, the LTA’s three questions suit the car because they hand the analysis to the child: what went well, what was difficult, what could be different next time. The parent’s part is to listen, follow the child’s lead and save any disagreement for another day.
So what not to say? Mainly the questions that open with “why”, the sentences that start with “you should have”, and anything that turns the drive into the match report the child did not ask for. Those conversations can still happen, later, when the child brings them up.
The drive home is short compared with a junior career, but it repeats every weekend for years. A child who knows the car is a safe place after a bad loss is more likely to keep telling their parents how tennis is really going.
Sources
- Tamminen, Bissett, Azimi and Kim (2022). Parent and child car-ride interactions before and after sport competitions and practices: video analysis of verbal and non-verbal communication. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 58, 102095. doi.org/10.1016/j.psychsport.2021.102095
- Tamminen, Poucher and Povilaitis (2017). The car ride home: an interpretive examination of parent-athlete sport conversations. Sport, Exercise, and Performance Psychology, 6(4), 325-339. doi.org/10.1037/spy0000093
- Elliott and Drummond (2017). During play, the break, and the drive home: the meaning of parental verbal behaviour in youth sport. Leisure Studies, 36(5), 645-656. doi.org/10.1080/02614367.2016.1250804
- Hamann, Thrower, Stokoe and Harwood (2025). What determines (in)effective post-competition parent-child interactions in British tennis? A conversation analysis of car journeys home. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 79, 102840. doi.org/10.1016/j.psychsport.2025.102840
- Knight, Boden and Holt (2010). Junior tennis players’ preferences for parental behaviors. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 22(4), 377-391. doi.org/10.1080/10413200.2010.495324
- Knight and Holt (2014). Parenting in youth tennis: understanding and enhancing children’s experiences. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 15(2), 155-164. doi.org/10.1016/j.psychsport.2013.10.010
- Harwood and Thrower. LTA Competition Parenting Course: summary and key messages. Lawn Tennis Association. lta.org.uk
- Harwood and Thrower. Mental and emotional skills: a guide for parents. Lawn Tennis Association. lta.org.uk
- USA Tennis. Recommended guidelines for successful junior tennis parenting. usta.com
- Henson (2012). What makes a nightmare sports parent, and what makes a great one. ThePostGame, 15 February 2012 (archived copy). web.archive.org
