10/06/2026
Get your kid into sport.
And I say that knowing it won’t protect them from everything.
Sometimes they’ll still experiment. Sometimes they’ll still go through it.
But here’s what I see when I sit with teenagers who got lost for a while... the ones who had sport in their history had something to come back to. The discipline was still in their body. The identity was still there, waiting. They knew how to show up even when they didn’t want to, because they’d done it a thousand times at training.
Sport doesn’t just prevent. It also recovers.
Two things that didn’t make the slides but matter:
The coach. Not the best coach... a consistent one. Someone outside your family who notices your kid, holds them to something, believes they have more in them. I cannot tell you how many teenagers I’ve worked with who, when everything else was falling apart, were still showing up because of one person at their club. That relationship is protective in ways that are hard to measure.
And the routine. A kid with a Tuesday afternoon training session and a Saturday game has structure their week is built around.
That’s not a small thing. Empty, unstructured time is where the risky choices happen... not because teens are bad, but because boredom and disconnection are genuinely hard to sit with.
It’s also not a one-season fix. It’s cumulative. It’s years of a child learning that they can do hard things, that belonging feels better than numbing, that their body is something worth looking after.
