How to Build a Healthy Mindset for Student Athletes

Whether your child is a swimming prodigy or a back-of-the-pack runner, balancing the pressures of academics and sports can be stressful for families.

It’s also a juggling act more families are facing—especially those with teenagers—as the number of students participating in high school sports recently reached an all-time high of 8.3 million in the 2024-2025 school year.

Having kids take part in sports offers tremendous benefits, from physical fitness to teamwork to social connection. But for some student athletes, sports can also cause stress and anxiety.

“Student athletes are often very high-performing in school and in their sport. They often hold themselves to very high standards, which can make them overly self-critical,” says Ayotunde Ayobello, MD, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the Yale Child Study Center. “And with more kids enrolled in sports, it means families are under more pressure whether it’s training and competitions or from the costs, which are also higher than they’ve been in the past. These pressures that parents experience can unintentionally be transferred to their children.”

All of this makes cultivating a healthy student athlete mindset important, says Dr. Ayobello, a former professional basketball player in Europe. “My background as a professional athlete and my work as a psychiatrist uniquely position me to help young people integrate both worlds in healthy ways,” he says. “Plus, where I work at the Child Study Center in Westport, we are seeing a significant rise in student athlete concerns as this is a competitive environment.”

This challenge isn’t unique to one region: Dr. Ayobello often helps families nationwide navigate these pressures and develop healthy coping skills.

The student athlete mindset describes the attitudes, habits, and mental strategies that can help young people juggle the demands of academics and sports successfully. Key parts of this mindset highlight discipline, strong time management, and resilience—specifically the ability to bounce back after challenges and setbacks in school and in athletics.

This mindset dovetails with what’s known as the growth mindset, or the belief that abilities can be developed through consistent effort, learning from mistakes, and trying new things.

“It’s important for student athletes to have the mindset of self-improvement. I often talk about how there are two types of athletes. One focuses on results, whether it’s the medal, trophy, or the end goal of simply participating. That is what drives them,” Dr. Ayobello says. “The other is about the process—setting specific goals, working on their technique, or being better than they were the previous day.”

Athletes who take the second approach, he says, tend to fare better, not only in performance consistency, but also in mental health and overall life satisfaction.

Dr. Ayobello encourages student athletes to employ SMART goals—goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time-bound. For instance, instead of saying “I want to be better at basketball,” a more precise goal might be raising one’s shooting percentage from 50% to 60% over six weeks.

When a game loss stings, Dr. Ayobello suggests reframing success: “I contested every ball,” or “I executed my movement well.” That shifts focus to effort and growth rather than only outcome. “This isn’t easy. Changing the way you think is like trying to make a muscle strong,” he adds. “But if you work at it, the stronger you become.”

Many student athletes identify themselves by the sport they play. While their sport is an important part of who they are, they should equally recognize other parts of their sense of self, Dr. Ayobello says.

“Having a multidimensional identity is saying, ‘I’m a good swimmer,’ or ‘I’m a good basketball player,’ and ‘I’m also a good friend or a daughter or a great artist,’” he says.

Student athletes can benefit from seeing themselves in multiple perspectives because when injuries or setbacks happen, this narrow identity can harm mental health. “With a multidimensional mindset, even if your season ends or you get sidelined, your sense of who you are isn’t shattered,” he adds.

As competition intensifies, more children are specializing early—playing one sport year-round at younger ages.

“We see kids as young as 7 or 8 starting to focus on a particular sport and hone their skills. It could be toward a goal of creating a golf or a tennis star, with parents signing an 8-year-old up at a fancy tennis academy,” Dr. Ayobello says. “But research shows us that children are still growing physiologically. Their bodies are still developing and they are more prone to injury. We find it’s usually best to delay specialization until they’re in their teens, maybe between 13 to 15, before they specialize, if that’s the path the child wants.”

Corinna Franklin, MD, a Yale Medicine pediatric orthopaedic surgeon, agrees.

“We are evangelists for keeping kids focused on being multisport athletes for as long as possible. If you look at even high-level professional athletes, many played multiple sports through high school,” she says. “Overtraining and overspecialization can contribute to overuse injuries, including stress fractures. If you’re using the same body parts in the same way over and over again, they don't take a break and they don't get the chance to move in different ways.”

A classic example, Dr. Franklin says, is pitching. “You can’t pitch an unlimited number of times without damaging either your elbow or your shoulder,” she says.

Teenagers are not always open with their parents about what’s bothering them, so it can be hard for caregivers to know if juggling athletics and school is causing problems.

One thing for parents to watch out for is if their child is being critical about themselves. “If they have a bad game, they may catastrophize or generalize and say, ‘I’m terrible,’ or ‘I’m never going to be good at this,’” Dr. Ayobello says. “This type of self-critical language can be a sign that a student athlete is taking on too much. They can’t recognize the good parts of a game. They might have scored three points but they made a mistake on one point, so only focus on that.”

Parents should also be careful not to let their own dreams influence their children’s when it come to sports.

“Many student athletes tell me, ‘I’m not really into this sport, but I feel obligated because my parents have invested so much,’ or they may say it’s their ticket to a particular college,” Dr. Ayobello says.

Whether or not a child should quit a sport, especially before the season ends, can be a tricky decision.

“Parents are often in the middle and don’t know if they should encourage their child to push through. But sometimes it’s not laziness—it’s that the child’s strengths or values lie elsewhere,” he says. “If parents encourage their child to finish the season and the child still feels disengaged afterward, it’s a good opportunity to explore what aspects of the sport no longer resonate and consider alternative interests.”

The Child Study Center offers family counseling to parents and children, which allows families to discuss issues that often aren’t explored at home—and can help ensure that sports decisions support a child’s authentic interests, not just their parents’ hopes. “It might be that the father really wants his kid to have an opportunity he never had, but we have to ask if that really aligns with this child’s strengths, values, and wishes,” he says.

Ultimately, sports should be fun and allow children to grow in a multitude of ways. But there should be a balance, Dr. Ayobello says. And sometimes, when struggles arise, counseling helps pinpoint other issues that have gone unrecognized in the classroom.

For example, a child may have undiagnosed anxiety that surfaces in athletics; realizing that this is what’s happening can bring an opportunity to treat it. “Or a kid who has issues with focusing may benefit from the structure of sports and we can work with them on that,” he adds.

Dr. Ayobello hopes the focus shifts toward nurturing a healthy student-athlete mindset, one that values growth and wellbeing as much as achievement, so that kids can truly thrive both in the classroom and on the field.