Parents as Co-Founders

The Reframe That Changes Everything

Most systems in youth development treat parents in one of four ways:

• Customers to be served
• Risks to be managed
• Interference to be minimized
• Passive observers watching from the sidelines

All four are wrong.

I've spent 35 years coaching junior tennis. I've watched hundreds of parent-coach relationships strain under misaligned expectations. I've seen parents apologize for asking questions. I've heard coaches complain about "parent problems" as if parents were obstacles to the real work.

The breakthrough that changed my entire approach came from asking: what if we're thinking about this wrong from the start?

What Parents Actually Are

Every parent of a junior athlete is making high-stakes decisions with incomplete information about someone else's development.

They're allocating resources. Thousands or tens of thousands of dollars per year. Hundreds or thousands of hours. Decisions about which program, which coach, how much training, what kind of competition schedule.

They're interpreting signals. Is this plateau normal development or a sign something's wrong? Is this struggle building resilience or creating harm? Is this coach's approach working or wasting time?

They're weighing tradeoffs. School versus training time. Social development versus competitive opportunity. Financial investment versus uncertain outcomes. Present enjoyment versus future potential.

They're choosing between competing goods. Should we prioritize technical refinement or competitive experience? Mental toughness or emotional well-being? Individual development or team environment?

That's not consumption. That's not observation. That's not interference.

That's co-founding a developmental enterprise.

Whether they feel qualified for it or not. Whether they asked for that responsibility or not. Whether they want it or not.

They already are co-founders. The only question is whether we acknowledge it and build structure to support it, or pretend they're customers and then resent them for not staying in that role.

What Changes When You See It This Way

Once you recognize parents as co-founders rather than customers, everything shifts.

Language Changes

The transactional frame disappears. Parents stop asking "what should I buy?" and start asking "what are we building?"

Coaching conversations move from service delivery to shared navigation. Not "here's what we'll provide" but "here's what we're seeing together, and here's how we might navigate it."

Questions become collaborative instead of evaluative. Not "is my kid getting better?" but "what are we noticing about how development is unfolding?"

The shift is subtle but profound. One frame treats parents as paying for expertise. The other treats them as partners in navigating ambiguity.

Responsibility Shifts

When parents are customers, the coach is a vendor. Success means delivering what was purchased. Failure means the service wasn't good enough. The parent's job is to evaluate whether they're getting their money's worth.

When parents are co-founders, responsibility is shared. We're navigating developmental complexity together. The coach brings domain expertise. The parent brings knowledge of their child that no one else has. Success means better navigation, not perfect outcomes. Failure means we need to adjust our approach together.

This doesn't mean the coach and parent have equal expertise. They don't. But they have different essential information that needs to combine for good judgment to form.

The coach sees technical patterns, competitive behaviors, and developmental trajectories across hundreds of players over decades.

The parent sees this specific child's patterns at home, under stress, in different contexts, across years. They know their child's history, temperament, learning style, and response to pressure in ways no coach can match in a few hours per week.

Both kinds of knowledge matter. Neither is sufficient alone.

Blame Dissolves

In a customer-vendor relationship, mistakes trigger blame. Who's at fault? Who failed to deliver? Who made the wrong decision?

In a co-founding relationship, mistakes are learning data. We tried something. It didn't work. What does that tell us? What do we try next?

The parent who pushed their child too hard in tournament scheduling isn't a "problem parent." They're a co-founder testing an interpretation and discovering it was wrong. The coach who recommended a training approach that backfired isn't incompetent. They made a judgment call with incomplete information that needs adjustment.

Blame requires clarity about who was responsible for what. Co-founding requires shared responsibility for navigating ambiguity together.

That doesn't mean no accountability. It means accountability looks different. Did we observe carefully? Did we test our interpretations? Did we adjust when evidence suggested we were wrong? Those are the questions that matter.

Agency Increases

Passive observers have no agency. They watch and hope. They trust or distrust. They stay or leave. Those are their only options.

Co-founders have agency. They shape conditions. They test interpretations. They contribute observations. They make decisions based on developing understanding rather than hoping someone else has the answers.

This is crucial because developmental complexity can't be solved by expertise alone. The expert can't see everything. The timeline is too long. The variables are too tangled. The counterfactual is unknowable.

What works is distributed judgment. Multiple perspectives combining to navigate ambiguity that none could navigate alone.

When parents understand themselves as co-founders, they stop waiting for the coach to have all the answers. They start contributing their observations. They test frames instead of accepting pronouncements. They develop interpretive capacity that serves them whether they stay with this coach or move to another program.

What This Looks Like in Practice

A 14-year-old player's tournament results decline over three months.

In a customer-vendor relationship, this triggers anxiety and evaluation. Is the coaching working? Should we change programs? The parent feels they're not getting what they paid for. The coach feels judged. Tension mounts. Usually someone leaves.

In a co-founding relationship, it triggers inquiry.

What are we actually seeing?

The parent notices the player is making decisions faster but less accurately under pressure. The coach sees technical patterns holding up but competitive patterns changing. The player reports feeling more awareness of options but less certainty about which to choose.

Together, they recognize: this isn't regression. This is developmental progress revealing a new challenge.

The player is seeing more of the game than they could before. Decision-making speed improved. But shot selection under pressure collapsed because they're processing more information than they know how to integrate yet.

None of them could see that alone. The parent only saw declining results. The coach only saw technical competence with competitive struggle. The player only felt confusion.

Together, they developed an interpretation that changes how they navigate the next three months. They're not going to panic and change everything. They're going to give this developmental phase time to consolidate while working specifically on decision-making under pressure.

That's co-founding. Not one expert having the answer. Not consensus where everyone agrees. But distributed cognition where multiple perspectives combine to see what none could see alone.

Why Some People Resist This

Some coaches resist this frame. They want parents to "trust the process" and stay out of the way. They view parent questions as interference. They believe their job is easier when parents are passive.

They're not wrong that parent anxiety can disrupt coaching. Parent demands for short-term results can undermine long-term development. Parent second-guessing can confuse players.

But those problems don't come from parents being involved. They come from parents operating with customer expectations in a context that requires co-founder understanding.

A customer demands results for money paid. A co-founder navigates complexity with incomplete information. Those are different relationships requiring different structures.

The coach who resists parent involvement is trying to solve a structural problem with a behavioral demand. "Trust me and stay out of the way" works if development were predictable and expertise were sufficient. It doesn't work when development is complex and expertise requires combination with parent knowledge to form good judgment.

And here's what coaches often miss: the right structure protects them too. When parents develop interpretive capacity, they stop demanding impossible certainty. They stop blaming coaches for developmental plateaus. They become genuine partners in navigation rather than anxious evaluators of service delivery. The coach who fears losing authority in a co-founding model hasn't seen how exhausting it is to maintain false authority in a customer model.

Some parents resist this frame too. They want to pay for expertise and get results. They don't want responsibility for navigating ambiguity. They want the coach to tell them what to do.

That's understandable. It's a natural preference. But developmental complexity punishes that preference. It's not compatible with how judgment actually forms.

You can't outsource judgment formation. You can buy instruction. You can buy training time. You can buy access to expertise.

But you can't buy understanding. Understanding forms through engagement with complexity over time. There's no shortcut. No amount of money makes someone else able to understand your child's development for you.

What Co-Founders Actually Need

If parents are co-founders, they need the structure that co-founders need.

They need space to develop interpretive capacity. Not just receive information, but learn how to interpret signals for themselves.

They need frame-testing environments. Places where competing interpretations can be held productively without premature resolution.

They need sustained engagement over time. Understanding doesn't form in single conversations. It develops through repeated encounters with complexity where patterns become visible.

They need protection from their own anxiety. The structure has to hold productive tension long enough for understanding to form instead of collapsing into false certainty when discomfort gets high.

Teaching hospitals provide this for residents. Design studios provide this for designers. Founder forums provide this for entrepreneurs.

Junior tennis provides none of it for parents.

That's the gap. That's what needs to exist.

Beyond Tennis

The co-founder frame applies anywhere developmental ambiguity meets long timelines and emotional investment.

Parents of musicians face it. Is my child's struggle with practice discipline a normal phase or a sign this instrument isn't right for them?

Parents of academically gifted kids face it. Is my child bored or lazy? Should we accelerate or let them develop at their own pace?

Parents navigating college admissions face it. Should we optimize for college admissions or for genuine learning?

Early-stage parents face it constantly. Is this behavior normal for this age? Is this a phase or a pattern?

In every case, the parent is making high-stakes decisions with incomplete information about someone else's development. That's co-founding.

Most systems treat them as consumers of expertise instead. Buy the right program. Hire the right tutor. Follow the right approach. Trust the expert.

It doesn't work because expertise alone can't navigate developmental complexity. The expert doesn't live with the child. Doesn't see patterns across contexts. Doesn't know the child's history the way parents do.

Good judgment requires combination. Expert knowledge plus intimate knowledge plus sustained observation over time.

That's co-founding. And it requires structure that supports it.

What That Structure Looks Like

The next piece describes the institutional layer I've been building. Not in theory. In operational detail.

What is it? How does it work? What makes it different from coaching, education, therapy, or consulting?

The short answer: it's the missing institutional structure where co-founders do the work co-founders need to do. Where judgment forms through sustained, structured inquiry instead of through information transfer or expert pronouncement. It looks less like a meeting and more like a case conference—multiple perspectives examining the same situation until understanding crystallizes.

Where parents stop asking "what should I do?" and start asking "what am I actually seeing?"

Where understanding emerges not from having the right answer, but from developing the capacity to navigate ambiguity well.

That's the architecture. That's what solving the Alcott Dilemma actually requires.

And it starts with recognizing who parents actually are: not customers, not observers, not interference.

Co-founders of a developmental enterprise that no one can navigate alone.

Next in this series: "The Missing Institutional Layer: What the Founders' Room Actually Is"

 About the author: Duey Evans has been coaching elite junior tennis players for 35 years. He is building institutional infrastructure that treats parents as co-founders of developmental enterprises rather than consumers of expert services.

A note on how to read this series: 

These essays are not meant to be consumed as advice or conclusions. They’re meant to be read as invitations to notice what you may already be experiencing but haven’t had language for yet.

I’m also exploring a companion project built around conversation rather than exposition. Not a podcast about opinions, but a place where questions are examined slowly and publicly.

If this essay sharpened your perception rather than answered your questions, you’re reading it with the right lens.