Parents & Pageants: How to Help Without Overstepping

Welcome to this week’s Q&A. Each week, I answer questions from our paid subscribers. Join to watch the full episode, get your questions featured, and access tailored help from me—all for a fraction of the cost of private coaching.

---

Buckle up - real talk incoming

This week’s question came from a parent: “How can I help my daughter with her pageant prep without overstepping?”

Short answer: there’s no shortcut. Long answer: keep reading.

1) The Question Beneath the Question

If you started your daughter young, you probably made the initial decision to enter her into pageants. If she’s begun in her teens, it may be a mix of her choice and yours. Either way, there isn’t a neat template where you parent a five-year-old the same way you parent a fifteen- or eighteen-year-old. You’re dealing with a young adult now — an individual — and that means the strategy is less "tell" and more "listen, understand, and guide".

From years coaching (more on that below), interviewing hundreds of contestants from all over the world, and judging the big systems, I’ve learned one thing that trumps all the tactics: you can’t help effectively if you don’t have an honest relationship where she trusts you. If you don’t know why she wants this, you’re guessing. And guessing is where overstepping usually happens.

2) What Coaching Teens Taught Me

I’m not a parent (yet), but I spent years as a tennis coach at an all-girls high school, working mostly with teenagers. I learned to speak with them as adults, to listen, and to let them figure things out while being available for guidance. The dynamic matters. I saw “perfect” parents end up with a five-year-old terror, and seemingly absent parents end up with extraordinarily mature kids. There’s a lot of environment and luck in the mix — which is why I really feel for parents. It’s the world’s most important job, the worst paid, and often the most thankless.

There’s something about age 15 in particular — first relationships and breakups, learning to drive, all of it. Many parents seemed to be just hoping their daughter would survive fifteen and make it to the other side. Through it all, treating teens like five-year-olds never worked. Treat them like the young adults they’re becoming.

3) Don’t Parent by Proxy

In a relatively affluent area, I saw this pattern constantly: a parent equates “good parenting” with paying for private lessons, coaching, tutoring — the best of everything. Then Saturday sport rolls around and they don’t even watch their kid compete. They’re chatting to other parents or scrolling their phones. The message the child absorbs: “You don’t actually care. Your job ends with the credit card.”

Hiring a coach can be helpful — sometimes it’s part of the plan — but it’s not the plan. Without your time and emotional presence, the whole thing wobbles. Your daughter doesn’t measure love in invoices. She measures it in whether you show up, pay attention, and try to understand what she’s going through. If you want to support a pageant dream, it starts with understanding the industry she’s in, the dream she has, and what she believes she needs to give herself the best chance.

And yes, you’re still the parent. With a teenage daughter you’re still in charge — legally and practically — but build a relationship based on open, honest communication. Tell a five-year-old what to do; with a teen, there’s more back-and-forth. That back-and-forth is exactly where trust is built.

4) Find Her Real “Why”