There is a moment we see every season. A ten year old hits three bad shots in a row, and something in their posture changes. The shoulders come down, the swings get quicker and shorter, and for the rest of the session they are not really trying, because not really trying is the only protection a child has against the possibility of failing.
Between the two of us we have taught more than 10,000 lessons, and we have watched that moment play out hundreds of times. What we have learned is that confidence in young golfers is not built by telling them they are good. It is built by arranging things so they can see, with their own eyes, that they are getting better. Praise is not the mechanism. Evidence is.
Confidence Comes From Competence, Not Compliments
The instinct when a child struggles is to reassure them. That was great, you’re doing so well, don’t worry about it. It comes from love and it does almost nothing, because children are far better at detecting empty praise than adults expect. A kid who has just topped five shots in a row and is told those were great learns two things at once: that the adult is not being straight with them, and that the situation must be bad enough to require comforting.
What actually builds belief is a child observing their own improvement. That means the adults around them need to create situations where improvement is visible and measurable in a short window. Rather than saying you’re getting better, count something and write it down: ten putts from three feet, how many went in. Ten chips, how many finished on the green. Then do it again next week and let the number speak. When a child sees six become eight, no reassurance is necessary, and the belief that arrives is theirs rather than borrowed.
This is why we build so much of our junior coaching around games with scores attached. It looks like fun, and it is, but the scorekeeping is doing quiet work. Every recorded number is a piece of evidence a child can hold against the voice that tells them they are no good at this.
Praise the Process, Not the Result
There is a well-supported finding in child development that holds up beautifully on a driving range. Praising a child for a result, particularly one framed as talent, tends to make them more fragile, because it teaches that their standing depends on outcomes they cannot control. Praising effort, decisions, and process makes them more resilient, because it points at things they can repeat on purpose.
In practice this is a small change in wording with a large effect. Rather than “you’re a natural,” try “you kept your balance on that one.” Rather than “great shot,” which attaches the value to where the ball went, try “you took your time and committed to that.” Rather than “you’re so good at putting,” try “you read that one really well.”
The difference matters most on bad days. A child praised for outcomes has nothing to hold onto when the outcomes stop, and a bad round becomes evidence against them. A child praised for process still has a great deal to be proud of after a poor round, because the things they were praised for are still available: they kept their routine, they stayed patient, they did not give up on the fifth hole. That is a child who can lose and come back.
Set the Bar Where They Can Reach It
A great deal of what looks like low confidence in young golfers is simply a task that is too hard. A child playing a full-length course from tees built for adults is not learning resilience, they are collecting evidence of failure at a rate no amount of encouragement can offset.
So change the task rather than the child. Move the tees forward, far forward, until they can reach greens in a sensible number of shots. Play fewer holes than you think, and stop while they still want more. Redefine par for the day if you like, so that a five on a par three is a good hole for a young beginner and gets treated as one. On the practice green, start the drill at a distance where they succeed more often than they fail, then move back gradually as the makes pile up.
The principle we use in junior sessions is that a child should be succeeding at roughly two out of three attempts. Much easier than that and they get bored. Much harder and they disengage to protect themselves. That two in three window is where kids will happily work for an hour and walk away feeling capable, and finding it for each child is most of what good junior coaching actually is.
Teach Them What to Do After a Bad Shot
Every golfer hits bad shots. The skill that separates the ones who enjoy the game from the ones who quit it is what happens in the twenty seconds afterward, and that skill can be taught explicitly to a nine year old.
Give them a physical reset rather than an instruction to feel differently, because telling a frustrated child to stop being frustrated does not work. Something concrete and repeatable: take a breath, tap the club head on the ground twice, look at the next target, walk. The specific ritual does not matter as long as it is theirs and it is the same every time. Jack tells juniors that the bad shot is allowed to exist until they reach their ball, and then it is finished, which gives a child permission to be annoyed and a clear line where the annoyance ends.
It also helps enormously to normalize the misses out loud. Young players often believe that good golfers hit good shots nearly all the time, so their own misses feel like proof they do not belong. Telling them plainly that every player they admire hits several genuinely poor shots in a round, and that the round is decided by what happens next, reframes the whole thing. The bad shot stops being a verdict and becomes a normal part of a game they are allowed to be learning.
Handling Nerves and the First Competition
The first time a young golfer plays in front of an audience, whether that is a junior tournament, a school team tryout, or simply the first tee with strangers watching, nerves arrive. This is not a problem to be solved, and treating it as one makes it worse.
The most useful thing you can tell a nervous child is that the feeling is normal, that it happens to everyone including professionals, and that it means they care about doing well. Nerves reframed as excitement rather than as a warning sign genuinely change how a child performs, and it costs nothing to offer that framing before they tee off.
Practically, two things help. The first is a routine they already trust, since a familiar sequence gives a nervous child something to do with their hands and their attention rather than standing over the ball with a racing mind. The second is a process goal for the day instead of a score goal. A child told to go shoot under 50 has been handed an outcome they cannot control. A child told to run their routine on every shot and keep walking after bad ones has been handed something they can succeed at regardless of how the ball behaves, and they will almost always score better as a byproduct.
Keep expectations for a first event deliberately low. The goal of a first tournament is to have played in one and want to play in another. That is the whole objective, and any child who finishes with that is a success no matter what the card says.
The Car Ride Home Matters More Than the Lesson
This is the single most important thing in this article, and it happens where no coach can see it.
Youth sports research keeps arriving at the same conclusion, and our own experience matches it exactly: the drive home is where a child’s relationship with a sport is quietly decided. It is the moment they are most vulnerable, having just finished, still processing, sitting in a confined space with the person whose opinion matters most to them. A parent who spends that drive reviewing what went wrong, however gently and however constructively, is teaching a child that their performance is the price of the parent’s approval.
The advice we give every junior parent is to hold one question in reserve for that drive: did you have fun? Ask it, listen to the answer, and let the child lead anything further. If they want to talk about the golf, they will, and then you can follow. If they do not, the round is over and the next conversation can be about lunch.
Six words are worth building into the habit for after any round, good or bad: I love watching you play. It contains no evaluation, makes no demands, and tells a child that your enjoyment of watching them is not conditional on how they performed. Parents who adopt it usually report that the drives home get much easier within a few weeks.
When Your Child Says They Want to Quit
It happens, often after a bad stretch, and how a parent responds in that moment matters a great deal.
Start by finding out what they are actually saying, because “I want to quit golf” frequently means something narrower. It might mean this week was frustrating, or that a particular kid in the group makes them uncomfortable, or that they feel they are disappointing you, or that they are tired and would like a weekend off. Asking a calm, open question and listening without arguing usually surfaces the real thing within a minute or two.
If the issue is a rough patch, a short break almost always works better than a lecture about persistence. Two or three weeks away, with no golf talk, and the game gets to become something they miss rather than something they owe. If the issue is that they feel watched and judged, the fix is on the adult side and it is worth being honest with yourself about that. And if the issue is genuinely that they have discovered they do not enjoy golf, that is an acceptable outcome. A child who is allowed to walk away from a sport without a fight is a child who may well come back to it at sixteen, or at thirty, and a child forced to continue is a child who will make sure they never touch it again.
The long game here is a person who plays golf for sixty years. Almost nothing that happens in a given season is worth trading that for.
Groups Build Confidence Faster Than Private Sessions
For most young golfers, particularly in the early years, learning alongside other kids does more for confidence than one-on-one instruction, and the reason is simple. A child who chunks a chip in a group immediately sees three other kids chunk theirs. The misery is shared, the standard becomes visible and reachable, and the private belief that they alone are bad at this cannot survive contact with the evidence.
Groups also supply something no coach can manufacture, which is peers. Kids work harder, stay engaged longer, and recover from frustration faster when there are other kids around, and the social side is frequently the thing that keeps a young player coming back long after the novelty of hitting balls has worn off. That is the thinking behind how we structure our junior clinics, and it is why we generally steer parents of younger children toward group settings first, a point we make in more detail in our guide to getting kids into golf.
Private instruction has its place, usually later, when a young player has chosen the game and wants to work on something specific. Confidence, though, is generally a group product.
The Point Is the Sixty Year Relationship
Confidence in a young golfer is not a mood you can install with encouragement. It is the accumulated result of a child seeing themselves improve at a task that was set at the right difficulty, being praised for things they can control, being taught what to do when it goes wrong, and going home to someone who is glad to have watched them regardless of the score.
Get those right and the golf takes care of itself. Get them wrong and you can produce a technically sound twelve year old who quits at fourteen, which we have watched happen and which is a genuinely sad thing to see. The goal was never a good junior golfer. The goal is an adult who still plays, still enjoys it, and someday stands on a range with their own kid teaching them all the same things.