I remember the cuckoo from childhood.
In summer, white mulberries hung from the trees, soft and sweet when they ripened. Somewhere among the leaves, I would hear the cuckoo calling. I knew its voice long before I understood anything about how it raised its young.
Years later, I learned something much stranger about that familiar bird. Some cuckoos lay their eggs in the nests of other birds, leaving another parent to incubate and raise their young.
It is not a gentle arrangement. A cuckoo may remove an egg already in the nest, and after hatching, some cuckoo chicks push the host’s eggs or chicks out. One young bird gains an extraordinary advantage. Another may lose everything.
Last night, while driving my daughter to soccer practice, for some reason I thought about the cuckoo again.
For the past four or five years, I have spent a great deal of time around youth soccer as a parent. During that time, I have watched many parents step into coaching roles.
There are good reasons for this. In smaller soccer communities, there have not always been enough coaches. Parents stepped forward because somebody had to. They gave their evenings, weekends and tournament days, often because their own children loved the game. Many became good coaches, and some teams might not have existed without them.
But youth soccer has changed. Families can now pay substantial fees for competitive soccer. Clubs employ coaches, hold tryouts, divide children by level and build increasingly organized pathways around the promise of player development. As children grow older, decisions about playing time, positions, team placement and advancement become more consequential.
Those decisions are difficult even when a coach has no relationship with any of the players. Then put the coach’s own child into the group. Or a younger sibling. Or another close relative.
A family relationship does not prove favoritism. A coach’s daughter may genuinely be the strongest player. A younger brother may deserve every minute he receives. But a conflict of interest does not require bad intentions.
Favoritism does not always look like favoritism from inside the decision. It can look like patience: I know what she can do; give her another game. It can look like understanding: that mistake isn’t really who she is. It can even look like development: she needs these minutes to gain confidence. Any one of those judgments may be reasonable.
The difficulty is that a parent knows the history behind one player in a way we rarely know the history behind the others. We remember the hours of practice. We know the poor first touch we just saw isn’t typical. When a pass fails, we understand what our child was trying to do.
Another player may make the same mistake and receive a different judgment. The coach may know less about what she has practiced, what she was trying to do, or what she might become if given another chance. That difference can be completely unintentional. It can also shape a young player’s path.
That is what concerns me most about family-linked coaching. The damage does not have to come from a parent deliberately deciding, “My child comes first.” It can grow through dozens of ordinary decisions: one more start, another game in the preferred position, more patience after a mistake, a place with the stronger group, an invitation to play up, or another opportunity to prove herself.
Each decision may be easy to explain on its own. Over a season or several years, however, those small advantages can accumulate. And because soccer opportunities are finite, the cost may be carried by another child.
I was reminded recently how different this feels in another sport. My younger daughter is a seventh grader and runs cross-country. After a strong performance at a recent meet, she was invited to train with the high-school team. If she continues to perform at that level, varsity may eventually become a possibility. There wasn’t much for anyone to debate.
The clock had already spoken.
The clock doesn’t know who her parents are. It doesn’t know which coach likes her. It doesn’t remember which group she was placed in last year. Eventually, she crosses a line and there is a number beside her name.
Soccer has no such clock. There is no number that tells us who should start at attacking midfield.
One coach values speed. Another sees vision. One remembers the turnover. Another remembers the pass that created a chance five minutes later. One sees a player who needs more time. Another sees a player who has already received enough chances.
That subjectivity isn’t a flaw we can remove from soccer. Seeing a player is itself part of coaching. But that makes the person doing the seeing enormously important.
Enormous power can sit inside an ordinary-looking decision: a name on a starting lineup, a child called toward one training group while another walks toward a different one, a player hearing, “You’re not starting today.”
Adults may experience these as soccer decisions. Children don’t always experience them that way. For a young player, the difference between being chosen and not being chosen can follow her into the car, sometimes all the way home.
More minutes for one player mean fewer for another. A place on a stronger team means someone else does not have that place. An opportunity to play up can accelerate one child’s development while another remains where she is. Repeated over time, access itself can begin to look like evidence of ability: the child who receives the stronger environment improves, gains confidence and becomes easier to choose again.
Meanwhile, another potentially talented player may receive fewer meaningful minutes, fewer chances in her best position, less exposure to stronger teammates and less opportunity to recover from mistakes. Eventually she may be labeled as a weaker player when part of what separated the two children was opportunity itself.
That is the unintended damage I think youth soccer needs to take more seriously.
Sometimes that child says nothing. She takes off her cleats, puts them in her bag and gets into the car. When her parent asks, “How was practice?” she says, “Fine.”
That was when the cuckoo came back to me. One chick gains space in a nest. Another may lose it.
The comparison only goes so far. Nature isn’t giving us a lesson in good parenting here. What the cuckoo does can be brutal for the bird whose nest it uses. It was simply the image of the nest that stayed with me.
When we make more room for one child, there may be another child waiting for a chance of her own.
There is also a reason independent judgment can help the coach’s child. If she truly deserves the stronger team, the starting position or the chance to play up, having someone without a family relationship recognize it protects what she earned. No child should lose an opportunity because of who another player is related to, and no child who earns an opportunity should have that achievement diminished for the same reason.
But the larger responsibility belongs to the adults who hold the authority.
Parents naturally create opportunities for their children. I certainly do. We drive them to practices, find teams, pay fees, rearrange weekends and travel for soccer. When they hurt, we hurt a little too. When they sit on the bench, part of us wants to put them on the field. When somebody doesn’t see what we see in them, part of us wants to explain. When a door closes, our instinct is to find another door. That is parenting.
Coaching can give us something more: control.
If I am the coach, I don’t have to sit helplessly while someone else misunderstands my child. I can give her another chance. I can put her where I believe she plays best. I can open the door that someone else might have closed. The intentions may be loving. But somewhere on that same field may be another child whose door remains closed.
And giving my child another opportunity may not only relieve her frustration. It may relieve mine. That is where love and control can become difficult to separate.
I may even be right. She may need another chance, and I may know her better than anyone else. But eventually I have to ask a harder question: am I helping her develop, or am I using my authority to make sure the road stays smooth?
Advancement and development are not always the same thing.
A player can advance without learning how to convince a coach who knows nothing about her. She can move through stronger teams without learning what to do when someone doesn’t immediately see what her parent sees. One day the parent may no longer be the coach. A new coach may not know her history. Another player may take her position. Nobody may step in.
We may think we are helping by making the nest larger. But eventually a larger nest is no longer what the child needs. She needs the edge.
That is what I kept thinking about as I drove.
None of this means parents should stop coaching their children. Youth soccer still depends on parent-coaches in many places, and some are among the best coaches a child could have. But when a family relationship exists within the coaching structure, goodwill alone is not enough. The relationship creates a responsibility to recognize the conflict and protect the other children from its effects.
As the stakes rise, so should the distance between family ties and selection authority.
That may mean independent eyes on team placement, advancement and other significant opportunities involving a coach’s own child or close relative. It may mean a coach stepping out of a decision rather than trying to prove that he or she can be perfectly impartial.
If a coach’s daughter deserves the stronger team, let someone else recognize it. If a younger brother deserves to start, let another coach see it too. The point is not to hold those players back. It is to make sure another talented child is not quietly held back instead.
And for the parent, stepping away from that authority may require a different kind of trust: trusting another coach to see the child, and trusting the child to convince someone who owes her nothing, to lose her place and try to win it back, and to hear “no” and keep going.
That, too, is part of becoming a player.
Parents spend years building nests around children. When they are small, we protect them, make room for them and catch them when we can.
But children grow. The branch beyond the nest may look less safe. Another coach may not see everything we see. The child may stumble. She may lose her place. She may even fall for a while.
Every instinct may tell us to make the nest a little bigger: just one more season, one more opportunity, one more door opened for them.
But there comes a time when love asks something different of us—not to stop caring or helping, just to move our hands a little farther away.
And see whether all those years were spent building a bigger nest—or growing wings.