You're You. You're Tough.

My son cut his chin open last week.

He was riding his bike on a trail near our house, hit a root, and the handlebars popped up and hit him in the face. The cut itself stung but it was a manageable kind of pain. He held it together until he looked down and saw blood on his hand, and that was the moment everything changed.

The fear took over. He started to cry. Not the small cry of a scraped knee, but the bigger cry of a seven-year-old who has just realized his body has been broken open in some small way and he does not know what to do with that information.

My husband and I both knelt down beside him. We did what most parents do in moments like that. We comforted him. We reassured him. We coached him through it.

I started running through what we practice together at home. The breathing exercises he and I have done since he was small. Focal point work, made fun and gamified for a kid his age. His "super power" statements. Things he has internalized over years of being my son and being on the receiving end of the mental performance work that runs through our house the way some families run through prayer or music.

He started to settle.

And my husband, who is wonderful and present and on the same page with me about all of this stuff, said the thing..

"You're a hockey player, you're tough."

I want to be careful here, because I am not writing this to call out my husband. I am writing it to call out a phrase. A phrase that almost every parent in youth sports has said some version of, probably more than once. A phrase I have absolutely said to myself more times than I can count. A phrase my husband said in that moment with the most loving possible intention, which was to help our son feel strong.

It worked, in the immediate sense. Our son took a deep breath. He nodded. He started to feel a little stronger.

And then I said, gently, "No, buddy. You're [his name], you're tough."

My husband caught it instantly. He understood the second I said it. He even smiled a little, the way you smile when your partner says the thing you would have said if you had thought about it for one more second.

But this is the part I want to talk about.

The phrase most parents reach for in moments like that is some version of "you're a [sport] player, you're tough." You're a hockey player, you're tough. You're a soccer player, you can handle this. You're a wrestler, get up. The intention is to remind the child of their strength.

What we are actually doing, subtly and without realizing it, is sewing a thread between their identity and their sport.

A single moment is nothing. A thousand of them is something else. Eventually, for some athletes, the sport and the self become so fused that losing one feels like losing the other.

I know this because I lived it.

When I retired from hockey, I felt worthless.

I want to be clear about how literal that word is. Not "sad." Not "lost." Worthless. As in, I could not find a sense of value in myself that was not tied to the game I had just stopped playing.

Hockey had been my identity since I was a child. It was the answer to "what do you do?" It was the answer to "who are you?" It was the structure my days were organized around, the friends I had, the goals I had set, the body I had built, the relationships I had with my parents and my coaches and my teammates. It was, by the time I retired, almost everything.

When it was gone, I was gone too. If hockey was who I was, and I no longer played, then who was I? What was I good at?

It took me years to untangle that. To rebuild a sense of self that was not contingent on whether I was playing well that week, or playing at all. To realize that the version of "tough" I had learned in hockey was real but incomplete. To learn how to be Danielle without also being a hockey player.

I do not want my children to have to untangle the same thing.

So I am paying attention to the phrases we use. The seeds we are planting. 

This is not about being perfect. It is not about parents needing to scrub their language of every sport reference. It is about noticing the pattern and shifting it where we can.

You're [name]. You're tough.

You're [name]. You can handle this.

You're [name]. You're brave.

You’re [name]. You can do hard things.

You’re [name]. Mistakes are how you learn and grow.

The sport gets to come in later. After the identity is anchored to the person, not the activity.

There is a moment in every athlete's life when they will stop playing the sport. Sometimes it is by choice. Sometimes it is by injury. Sometimes it is by being cut, or aging out, or losing love for the game. It will happen. Every athletic career ends, including the ones that go all the way to the top.

What is left behind when the sport ends is the person.

If the person was built around the sport, the end of the sport is the end of a lot more than a career.

If the person was built first, and the sport was something they did rather than something they were, the end of the sport is a hard transition but it is a survivable one. The person remains.

I want my kids to be people who happen to play sports. Not athletes who happen to be people.

It starts with the phrases we use when they are bleeding in the dirt at seven years old and looking up at us for proof that they are okay.

You're you. You're tough.

That is enough.