There’s Always a Kid Who’s Better
You’ve been told a sharp sports parent keeps an eye on the competition. The science says that’s exactly how you build the more fragile athlete.
You’re at the edge of the field during warmups. Your kid is running the same drill they always run. And then you notice the other one — a lane over, a little faster, a little sharper, sure of every movement in a way yours isn’t yet. You didn’t decide to look. You just did. And somewhere under your ribs a quiet math problem starts solving itself.
Where does mine rank?
Here’s the first thing nobody tells you: that instinct is not a character flaw. In 1954, a psychologist named Leon Festinger laid out something we’ve confirmed a thousand times since — human beings are built to gauge themselves against the nearest available yardstick, especially when there’s no objective ruler handy. (Festinger, 1954) You’re not a bad parent for keeping score. You’re a working piece of standard human wiring. And you hand that wiring down without saying a word.
But you’ve been sold a story about that scoreboard. The story says a good parent watches the field, clocks the competition, always knows where their kid stands — because that’s how you stay ahead. That’s how you raise a competitor.
It’s a good story. It’s also backward.
Let me translate what the research actually says, because it’s been sitting in the journals for forty years and almost nobody moves it out where a parent standing at the edge of a field can use it.
Sport psychologists have a name for the two ways a kid can decide I did well today. Call the first one the scoreboard: I did well because I beat someone. Call the second one the yardstick: I did well because I did something today I couldn’t do last week. John Nicholls built the framework; Joan Duda spent a career carrying it into sport: same game, same kid — two completely different engines. (Adie et al., 2008)
And here’s what the studies keep finding. The kid running on the scoreboard is the more fragile one. The yardstick kid shows more persistence, more enjoyment, and more effort after a bad day — the scoreboard kid craters when they’re not on top (Mayo, 2025).
Sit with why that is.
The scoreboard kid can only feel good when they’re winning. And by plain arithmetic, most kids are not winning most of the time — there is exactly one fastest kid in the pool, and it isn’t yours most weeks, and it isn’t anyone else’s most weeks either (Gladwell, 2013). So you’ve hitched your child’s sense of themselves to a thing that is, by design, mostly out of reach. First real setback, the board flips to red, and there’s nothing underneath it.
The yardstick kid has somewhere to stand no matter what the other lane is doing. Rough meet? Did I get better at the one thing I was working on? is a question they can always answer honestly, and often answer yes. That kid keeps showing up. That kid is still in the sport five years later, long after half the scoreboard kids have quit (Deci & Ryan, 2000).
Now connect it back to you, because here’s the part that stings.
Your kid learns which engine to run from you. Not from your speeches. From your questions in the car.
“Did you win?” builds a scoreboard. “Where did you get better?” builds a yardstick. Ask one for ten years, and you get one kind of athlete. Ask the other, and you get the other. It’s that mechanical. It’s that slow. And it’s almost entirely in your hands.
So when you catch yourself at the edge of the field running the math on the faster kid a lane over — you don’t have to feel guilty about the instinct. Festinger says the instinct is coming whether you like it or not. You just have to not hand it down. The comparison is yours to notice and yours to swallow. What comes out of your mouth on the drive home is a choice.
Here’s the flip.
You thought watching the competition was the competitive thing to do. It isn’t. It builds the kid who breaks the first time the competition is winning. The parent who quietly stops keeping score of other people’s children is the one raising the athlete who they can’t rattle.
There’s always a better kid. That’s the good news. Your job was never to out-rank them. It was to build the one kid on that field whose engine doesn’t need them.
This Sunday — The Rearview Routine. I’ll hand you the tool that makes all of this automatic: the three comparison traps to catch yourself in before you open your mouth, the exact swap from scoreboard questions to yardstick questions, and a two-minute weekly loop your athlete runs on themselves — so their reference point stops being the other lane and starts being last Tuesday. Paid subscribers get it in their inbox, plus a one-page Glovebox card for the car.
Free every Friday. The tools that put it to work land Sundays for members.
Resources
Festinger, L. (1954). A Theory of Social Comparison Processes. Human Relations 7(2), pp. 117-140. https://doi.org/10.1177/001872675400700202
Adie, J. W., Duda, J. L. & Ntoumanis, N. (2008). Achievement Goals, Competition Appraisals, and the Psychological and Emotional Welfare of Sport Participants. Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology 30(3), pp. 302-322. https://doi.org/10.1123/jsep.30.3.302
Mayo, D. 2025. Overcoming Anxiety for Student-Athletes. Inkful Borders Publishing.
Gladwell, M. (2013). David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants. Little, Brown and Company.
Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227-268. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327965PLI1104_01