Jay Hanna: Pushy ‘participating parents’ like Rachael Finch need to let their kids develop resilience

This story starts on a freezing-cold oval in the middle of winter, because everyone knows that’s the ideal time to hold school cross-country events — when the air is so chilly it burns the lungs of participants and causes instant earache.

As I watched a lone parent running alongside their child, I suddenly realised the answer to a question I didn’t even know I’d been pondering. What happens to helicopter parents when their kids grow up? — they become pushy “participating parents”.

OK, so I may have made up that term, but the phenomenon is real. These parents aren’t content with cheering their kids on from the sidelines at athletics carnivals or cross-country races, and instead take part themselves in a bid to push/encourage/shame their child into doing their best.

Just like helicopter parents, participating parents are too involved, too invested, too caught up in their kid’s life to let them make their own decisions or, literally, run their own race.

Personally, I can’t imagine anything worse. Five years ago I became an unwitting and unwilling participant in the student/parent relay race at my children’s primary school.

She crossed the line, and I’m not talking about the finish line.

It was the singular most stressful and — had we not walked, or in my case hobbled, away with the win — potentially humiliating experience of my life.

It took six months and numerous contributions to my physio’s boat fund to repair the physical damage, but the mental scars remain. Which is why these days I prefer to watch my offspring compete from the comfort of a camping chair, coffee in hand.

Model turned health and fitness influencer Rachael Finch appears to be the celebrity cheerleader for participating parents.

Even if I wanted to follow in Finch’s Hoka-clad footsteps, there’s just no way I could because, thanks to some genetic trickery, it turns out my son is not only good at maths (which is baffling enough) but distance running as well.

I’d assume he was switched at birth, but he’s my doppelganger so I can’t in good conscience disown him.

While Finch pranced alongside her daughter bellowing: “Suck in the air! Watch the rocks! That’s it, Violet, well done!”, I’d be busy eating dust before collapsing in a hyperventilating heap behind my boy, gasping, “I’m fine! Go on without me!”, as he faded from view.

Finch’s overzealous involvement was debated on social media and Outspoken, the Podcast where sisters Amy, Kate and Sophie Taeuber called her behaviour “next level” and questioned why the school allowed it. They suggested it would be off-putting for the other kids and that Finch was “living vicariously” through her daughter.

Finch fired back in a video posted to Instagram where she defended her right to “support, encourage and motivate my child to do the very best that she can do”.

Violet came 12th out of 100 participants, which is nothing to be sneezed at, but you have to wonder how the kid who came 13th felt . . . except in the age of social media, you don’t have to wonder, because her mother also took to social media to explain how Finch’s involvement marred the experience for her child.

“My daughter was running directly behind her (Violet),” the mother wrote. “She was too intimidated to overtake due to the mum yelling and getting in the way.”

Finch can spin it any way she wants, but the fact is she crossed the line, and I’m not talking about the finish line.

As school cross-country events take place across WA, culminating in interschool events later this month and the “all schools” cross-country championship in August (best secure a parking spot at McGillivray Oval now), the consensus among my mum friends is that most of us have seen participating parents in action.

Exception is obviously given to parents of children with special needs who can do whatever they need to do.

But for everyone else, if you feel inclined to don the Lululemon or Under Armour and limber up for a few laps alongside your child during an official race, then take a step back and think twice.

Parenting experts are unanimous in their view that if parents are always there to bolster their children when their strength, energy or self-belief is waning, they will never learn resilience. And surely, if there’s one trait future athletes need in abundance, it’s resilience.