We are an athletic family, my husband and I grew up as athletes, and have always been active, so the concept of a team, and learning to lead from your current spot are not foreign. However, taking that concept and applying it as a parent is another thing altogether. How to apply that concept to three tiny humans who have no concept of a team takes ironically, teamwork.


As engineers in leadership positions, my husband and I have been to a plethora of leadership, management and teamwork classes, workshops and training. We have led departments and divisions, blazed trails in business, but applying those concepts to children? Why not.

Why not teach from early on how to be a teammate and lead from where they are? Unknowingly my husband and I both embodied so much of what we learned at work, it naturally flowed into our home. We took it for granted until I started talking with other parents and realizing that our job as parents is to create and mold the next generation of functioning adults.

Pause life……MOMMY PANIC MOMENT!


The gravity of equipping a child with all the tools they need to be successful in just 18 years hit me like a ton of bricks. I remember chatting with God, (as I often do in prayer)

“Hey God, those blessings you trusted me with, are you sure? My faith tells me you are, but dude, that’s a whole lotta stuff I gotta teach them”

As I began to ponder how does one simply cram that much stuff into 18 years, I realized, foremost, faith, my examples, and to do what you know. Let God lead. So we did.


For my football fans, how cool would it be if our kids, early on in life were miked for the game and we could stand on the sidelines, watch and provide info through the helmet when they needed it. The answer is we can. We can! We can take a time out, half time. But we have to do the coaching in practice. We have to practice being a team and being teammates. Before we can ever step into the field as a team in a packed stadium, with half the fans waving our pictures on sticks wanting us to succeed, the other half waving a foam finger at us clearly wanting us to not succeed, with all the distracting music, cameras in our face, reporters, social media recounting out every move… oh wait, that’s not a football game, that’s life.

Is first let’s consider a team. A team needs a coach. So naturally, a parent is an ideal coach, right? Here’s the catch both my husband and I are coaches. My husband and I take turns being the head coach. Let’s just face it. There are things that he is naturally gifted at, and so am I but those things are different. So we take turns. Just by doing that, my husband and I are demonstrating the concept of working as a team. We are demonstrating that it’s okay not to be good at everything. We are demonstrating our ability to be supportive and take on different roles. We are demonstrating how to recognize strengths and build on weakness.

After reading what I just wrote, I can imagine my kids sitting around the table in high chairs, with my husband and I standing with our leadership books talking all this mumbo jumbo buzzwords to the kiddos as the food flies across the room, the dog eating the food as it hits the floor, complete chaos ensues.

As funny as that image was to me, that’s not it at all. It’s the intentional recognition of our roles and the messages we send as parents. I’d like to say that parenting teamwork is easy, but let’s get real. An NFL coach has an easier job. At worst he’s is coaching a 300-pound 2-year old that is at a minimum socially adept and at best is coaching highly intelligent, fully integrated adults. Both of which he gets to take a break from at the end of the day. Parents are taking the tiny non-socially adept child and molding them into a functioning adult, with no break. Kinda like running a marathon. No breaks. We as parents are constantly on the job.

Now that we established that we have two coaches that constantly change roles, let’s look at the team. There are the kiddos. They have on the uniforms. They all have talents and weaknesses so we have to juggle the roster and bring out the best in our athletes to help them succeed. We have to recognize the weak areas and work on them or be aware of them as the case may be.

How does a child lead on the team?
So let’s look at an example. Love me some 5S (think it’s 6S now) regardless, the concept is ‘everything has a place and everything is in its place’. Great concept. Now teach it to a 2-year-old. Turns out it not that hard. We equipped out playspaces, our rooms with bins and organizing devices. Did I mention we are engineers? Oh heck yeah! We can organize some stuff! The important part is that each bin, drawer, etc has pictures on it of what belonged in it. My kids are the ones who made the pictures or put stickers on the bin. So at the time, it just made sense to us that if we set the expectation for our kids to put stuff away, then they should have a say on where their stuff went. Did it really matter whether the balls were in the red bin or the green bin? No, It did not. What mattered is the kids took responsibility for their stuff and keeping track of it. We also didn’t realize by allowing the kids to pick out stickers, or draw pictures on the bins they were taking ownership and we were gaining buy-in. Due to our training at work, these things just came naturally. Allowing them to make choices, allowing them to fail…really if the collection of Barbie’s doesn’t fit in the bin, go ahead and try. This was so freaking hard, engineers problem solve, the bin is tooooooo small. Uggggghh. But what we were actually doing is teaching how to problem-solve. So the conversation went something like this


Parent: how about the balls go in the blue bin.
Kid: points to the red bin (which is clearly too small)
Parents engineering mind: OMG, that’s way to small blue bin.
Parent: are you sure?
Kid: points to the red bin
Parent engineering mind: seriously, the freaking blue bin, heart palpitations, blood pressure rising, sweat beading up on the forehead)..
Kid (rapidly putting ball stickers of balls on the red bin….)
Parenting engineer… OMG freaking exploding…are you really my kid? Brain cells totally exploding
Parent (hands kid the balls to go in the too-small bin)
Kid (fills up the red bin, takes the red bin and puts it in the blue bin and adds more balls).
Parent engineering mind : smartass, but well played.

My point here is at a very young age our actions as parents were engrained by our training, as leaders and teamwork demonstrated teamwork and coaching. We unknowingly were teaching teamwork to our kids.