In a world childhood of anxiety, how do you teach resilience to kids? Here's how I did it with baseball and video games.

The crack of the ball leaving the bat rang through the cement-lined stadium. As the ball lifted into right field, the thought that ran through my mind was "Can of Corn." I heard a coach beside me whisper, "We've got a guy." Yeah, this was an out... or at least... it should have been.

Sparky got a good jump. He read the ball off the bat and charged in. But then... I didn't hear him call for it. Sparky's a quiet kid, but the stadium was dead quiet. My stomach started to turn as I watched him pull up. "No," I whispered... Everyone held their breath. His glove only half raised, like he'd run out of gas, and then he stopped... and the ball dropped. It bounced five feet in front of him. The tiny crowd of parents for the other team exploded in cheers. The batter, who was having his own little meltdown, suddenly looked up and booked it to first base.

He needn't have worried. Sparky trotted up to the ball, picked it up, and lobbed it to the cutoff man at second base. I let out a long sigh and dropped my head.

I didn't feel sorry for Sparky. I felt sorry for the kid on the mound. He needed that out. Sparky turned and trotted back to his position.

Coaching the process clearly had not worked for him.

The question burning in my mind was, "Why?"

Managing Shame

Sparky had found a way to manage his stress. And it worked for him. The problem was, it didn't work for anyone else, especially his teammates. Sparky giving up on that ball was not only about him, it was about the other kids sitting in the dugout who also wanted to play. It was about the pitcher on the mound. In baseball everyone is on an island, there's no wall of bodies to hide behind. And that attention, that relentless attention, can really mess with kids.

You see, for Sparky, this was not an issue of "getting better." He knew how to catch a fly ball. No, this was about avoiding future embarrassment. His logic went something like this: "You can't blame me for not making the play, because I didn't do my best." The implication, of course, is that if he had done his best, he would have caught the ball. By not trying, Sparky had learned to protect himself from the pain of failure. It's a weird and convoluted way to think, but I've seen it a lot. Holding back as a form of emotional protection. Getting yelled at for not trying hard, it seems, is much easier than doing your absolute best and still failing. One failure you already know how to handle. The other? That is just too risky. So Sparky had learned to "sandbag."

But sandbagging is not the only way to manage shame. It has an evil twin. I call it the rage monster. The kid who gets so angry at himself for making a mistake, you'd think his head might explode. The rage monster is like a loudspeaker blaring, "Don't you dare get mad at me, no one could be more mad at me than I am." Dash, our third baseman, was an expert rage monster. If he struck out he'd get so upset his father would walk away because his mother consoled him. On some level, I suspected that was a double win for Dash.

As baseball legend Honus Wagner observed, baseball is "Organized Humiliation." I couldn't blame those boys for managing their shame.

But I did need to figure out what to do about it.

Safe to Try

I realized I did not need to convince Sparky to try. I needed to convince him it was safe to try. Learning to face failure is one of the single most important skills you can develop in baseball. But how to convince Sparky and Dash of that?

By helping them build their identity around their effort.

I learned that "How you do anything is how you do everything" is not just a quip, but a tool. At practice we made everything about effort. And not just any effort. Max effort. Every drill. Every rep. Every time. Some people thought I was crazy, or too harsh on the kids, but not the kids. They knew they could do more, and they wanted to. I don't think a single coach expected more from a player than deep down they expected from themselves.

The Video Game Connection

You might be reading this and thinking, "Great, but my kid doesn't play sports." Yeah. I get that. And you're not alone. During the "change years" (late elementary through middle school), almost two thirds of boys will opt out of team sports. And from where I sit it seems obvious that many of those kids end up playing hours of video games.

While games are entertaining, they do very little to develop player resilience. What's more, in my experience, many gamers have perfected Sparky's defense mechanism. They don't just sandbag. They quit. It's more or less the same thing. Rather than face failure, you run from it. But if you never have to face it, how will you learn to deal with it?

So how do you make players face it?

The Tool: Start With a Strong Finish

Answer: Start with a strong finish.

When we coached youth competitive video games, we adapted the effort strategy slightly for gaming. We translated hustle into commitment. If you start it, you finish it.

That's it. You have to finish. Especially with competitive games, the ones played with and against other people.

We wanted the players to focus on how they showed up. Are you dependable? Are you committed? Can you finish what you start? We coached resilience through persistence.

How do you put this into practice? First, by talking to your child about their gaming. If what they play is competitive, ask them, "Did you finish the match?" And then listen to their answer.

Also, when your child begs for more game time, you can make it conditional on sticking out tough matches. No extra game time for quitters.

Your player should know why you have this rule. You might say, "You need to see yourself as someone who sees hard things through to the end. You're a finisher." Resilience is built through emotional regulation and practice. Someday life will hand them a challenge they can't quit. I know parents who play video games with their kids, and they have their own versions of these exact same rules.

And as for Sparky? He became as dependable as anyone on the team. Not a perfect player, but one good enough to play for his high school team. More than anything, the coaches "loved his hustle."

We coached our kids to be relentless. (In a good way.) I'll bet you can do the same.

Give it a try. Let me know how it works for you.