“Teaching happiness”: How raising a successful athlete can mean raising a successful person

TenniStory: Zheng Qinwen's family journey

During the early 2000s, Frank Giampaolo watched as his step-daughter, Sarah Fansler, climbed the junior ranks in California and eventually earned a scholarship to USC. But even as Frank was taking notes on Sarah’s opponents, he couldn’t help noticing what his fellow parents were up to on the sidelines and in the clubhouses at tournaments. It didn’t take long for this longtime teaching pro to decide that his parental peers could use a little coaching of their own.

“I realized then how difficult a job being a tennis parent is, and that no one was educating them on how to navigate that journey,” Giampaolo says.

Being a tennis parent, according to Giampaolo, comes with “a detailed job description.” In most other sports, there’s a school team and a coaching staff that handles everything from running practices to planning schedules to organizing road trips to paying expenses. When it comes to junior tennis, though, a parent and child are mostly on their own. How involved should you be in your kid’s tennis life? When are you helping, and when are you hurting? Is it possible for a parent to have the emotional distance needed to be a coach, too? Few roadmaps exist for families to follow.

In 2014, Giampaolo set out to answer these questions and others in The Tennis Parents’ Bible, his “comprehensive survival guide” for adults entering the high-strung world of junior tennis. Now he’s back with a second book on the subject, The Psychology of Tennis Parenting.

“What’s different in this new book is that the focus is on preparing the child’s mindset for the reality of the journey,” Giampaolo says. “Often that means rerouting the parents’ old school views.”

Across 19 chapters, Giampaolo covers the full range of traditional tennis-parent concerns. But as the title indicates, this is a book tailored for a moment in America when mental health, and in particular the mental health of young people, is of growing concern.

Giampaolo believes it’s a long overdue shift in emphasis.

“The importance of mental and emotional development is finally being acknowledged,” he says, “but a lack of implementation is still an issue.”

For Giampaolo, this is where parents come in. While they may not be qualified to teach a forehand or a backhand, they are responsible for helping their kids develop the “mental and emotional aptitude needed to navigate competitive pressures.” If they can successfully teach those skills, Giampaolo believes that parents will create more than just good tennis players.

“I do believe the game makes kids better people,” he says. “Tennis is a great way of teaching important life skills and character traits—resiliency, courage, focus, problem solving, time management.”

Giampaolo also thinks the game gives parents a chance to model mature behavior.

In tennis, as in life, it doesn’t pay to be a perfectionist. “Even the best players only win 55 percent of the points they play,” Giampaolo says.

In tennis, as in life, it does pay to have a “growth mindset rather than a fixed mindset”—i.e., to be open to learning new shots as you rise up the ladder, and adopting new strategies for every new opponent you face.

In tennis, as in life, it doesn’t get you anywhere to complain about the conditions you’re playing in, or an opponent’s lucky shot. Instead, treat these as real-world opportunities for young people to learn the value of patience, and to be emotionally flexible enough to adjust.

Before any of that, though, Giampaolo believes the most important thing that a tennis parent can do is to “teach happiness.” He begins his new book with this phrase:

“Winning isn’t the way to happiness; happiness is the way to winning.”

That might sound like a platitude at first, but it flips what many of us believe on its head. People who play tennis, or any sport, become addicted to the emotions we feel after a victory, so much so that we start to think that winning is the only possible source of happiness in sports, and that losing is a source of shame.

According to Giampaolo, keeping young people from getting caught in this emotionally destructive cul de sac is where a tennis parent’s job begins.

Parents should show their children that “happiness is a state of being” rather than the result of any accomplishment. Playing tennis will always involve highs and lows; losses are part of the sport, whether we like it or not. That means the “athletic happiness” of a child should include those highs and lows, rather than just the highs. Happiness should come from the experience of trying to improve. Once you frame it that way, wins became a chance to find out what you’re doing well, and losses become a chance to find out what you need to improve—nothing more and nothing less.

As Giampaolo puts it, “Having to wait until you win to be happy is a disastrous habit to get into.”

So what’s the secret to getting your child to “trust the process,” and set aside the result? For Giampaolo, it might be the most important lesson of all, for parents and kids: Listen.

“After a loss, I don’t recommend a parent tell a child anything,” he says. “I recommend them asking questions and listening. Saying, ‘Here’s my observation, what are your thoughts?’”

Conversing rather than lecturing; listening to another person’s viewpoint; feeling like you’ll be heard when you talk; working to solve a problem together. We’d all be better off if we could learn to do these things a little more, wouldn’t we?