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Play the shooting ladder gameAdjusting Difficulty Mid Game: Four Dials for Football at Home
Parent Play Style
Adjusting difficulty mid game means changing one thing about a football game while it is still running. One thing, one notch, in the gap between goes. There are four dials to choose from: how far away you are, how the ball arrives, how big the target is and how many goes count. The first two are your own behaviour, so you can move them without saying a word. The last two are visible to your child, so they land better offered as a choice. The signal to turn one up is boredom. The signal to turn one down is three misses in a row.
This is for the evening where it was working and then it wasn't. Somewhere around the third miss the ball started coming back more slowly and the commentary stopped. Now you're standing on the lawn deciding whether to change something or ride it out with a child who has gone quiet. The phrase itself is borrowed from video games. This is the version with a real ball in it.
The gap moves while you play
Why It Got Hard When Nothing Changed
The game didn't get harder. The distance hasn't changed and neither has the target, and it's the same ball it was five minutes ago.
What moved is your child. The tenth go isn't the first go. Legs are tired, the light is going, next door's dog has turned up at the fence and there have been nine attempts already. A thing that was on the edge of possible four minutes ago has slipped a few inches out of reach.
Which means difficulty isn't a setting the game holds. It's the gap between the game and the person playing it, and that gap moves inside five minutes without anybody touching anything.
That's why picking the right level at the start doesn't solve this. The right level at the start is still the right level at the start; it just isn't the right level by minute four. The fix has to happen while the game is running, or it doesn't happen at all.
For a long time I thought a game was either the right one or the wrong one, so when it stopped working I changed the game instead of changing one thing about it. We spent the last two minutes of a five-minute session setting up something new.
Four dials, one at a time
The Four Dials, and Which Two Are Yours
Four things change how hard a game is without stopping it, and they're in this order for a reason. The first two are the ones you can move without anyone noticing. The second two are visible, so they are the natural ones to offer, though any of the four can be handed over as a choice.
- 1
How far away you are. One step in, not "come closer". Moving your own feet is what keeps it invisible, and you do it while you're collecting the ball so it never looks like a decision that was made about them.
- 2
How the ball arrives. Rolled along the ground is the easiest thing on this list, then a bounce, then thrown, then fast. Change how you serve it and you've changed the game without touching the game.
- 3
How big the target is. Anything about the target counts: wider gap, lower target and softer target all make it easier; a narrower gap makes it harder. This one is visible, so it's the one to offer rather than perform: "shall we make the gap bigger?"
- 4
How many goes count. Ten goes becomes five. "Till it goes in" becomes "three tries then it's my turn". Visible again, so offered again.
Two rules make the dials work, and both of them are about holding back.
One dial, one notch. Move two things at once and you can't tell which one was the problem, and you've usually overshot into a game that isn't asking anything at all. That's the failure worth naming, because nobody warns about it: not a game that stayed too hard, but one that got so easy it stopped counting.
Between goes, never during one. The moment to move is while the ball is being fetched, not while it's being struck. Adapting a game while you are playing only works if the adapting happens inside the rhythm of the game, and a change made mid-strike is one more thing for your child to deal with at the exact moment they're busy.
None of this is new to anybody who coaches. Coaches and PE teachers already have a four-part vocabulary for changing an activity on the fly, the STEP principle, where the letters stand for space, task, equipment and people. That's guidance from a sports charity rather than research, and it tells you what you can change without telling you when to change it. Its fourth element barely exists when the whole session is two people in a garden. So the dials above are the garden version of that idea, not a reprint of it.
Anyone who wants the target itself thought through properly has a page for that, so this one doesn't design one.
The signal you can count
How to Tell It Is Time to Turn One
Three misses in a row. That's the line, and it's countable on purpose.
Not one miss, because one miss is a miss and getting the next ball moving straight away already handles that on its own. Not five, because by five the session is already going wrong and a change at that point reads as a rescue. Three, because you can count to three while holding a ball, and counting to three doesn't ask you to be right about your child's mood.
Two other things are worth noticing alongside the count, and neither needs you to look hard. The ball comes back more slowly each time. The running commentary dries up.
Nobody announces that they're struggling. By the time they ask to do something else you have already missed the moment where making it winnable would have worked, which is why the commentary going quiet is the one to catch.
The other direction gets missed far more often, and it deserves its own paragraph because it's the half most advice skips. The signal to make it harder is boredom, not success. A child scoring every go who has stopped watching the ball, or who has started inventing a harder version of your game without being asked, is telling you to turn a dial up.
If the quiet turns into it being said out loud, there's a page for the version where the child says it out loud, and it carries the reset scripts, so this page doesn't build a second set.
Move your own feet, not the target
Turning It Down Without Saying So
When it's a rescue, change your own behaviour. Your own behaviour is the only difficulty setting your child can't see you touching.
So you take a step in while you're picking the ball up. Or you roll the next one along the grass instead of bouncing it, or you wait a beat longer before you serve so they're set instead of caught out. One of those, not all three. Nothing gets announced or apologised for, and the game keeps going.
That's how to make a football game easier for a child without the change becoming an event, and it's the whole of the quiet method.
The fork matters, though, and it needs saying plainly: quiet is for the rescue down and for putting the dial back up afterwards. It isn't for everything else. The rest of the time the better move is to hand a dial over as a choice instead of turning it yourself, because a choice needs no explaining and doesn't read as a downgrade.
"Shall we go from here, or from the fence?"
Both are fine, neither one is the easy option, and whichever they pick is the level.
Then the short list of what not to do.
Don't narrate the change. "I'll make it easier for you" turns a small adjustment into a verdict about how they're doing, said out loud, by the person whose opinion counts most.
Don't move the target while they're watching and then say nothing about it. A silent change to something that belongs to them is the version that lands as pity, which is the opposite of what the quiet method is for.
Don't undo it two goes later either. Putting it straight back tells them the change was about their feelings and not about the game.
A page going deeper on the words themselves is written and isn't published yet.
Where the levels come from
What the Research Says About Getting the Level Right
This is the only section on this page with studies in it, and every one of them arrives with what it can't tell you attached.
Start with why the level has to be judged live. The challenge point framework (Guadagnoli and Lee, 2004) sets out the idea that how difficult a task is depends on the skill of the person doing it and on the conditions they're doing it in. What a learner gets out of practice depends on that match and not on the task by itself. That's a framework paper and not an experiment. It has no participants at all, and neither children nor football anywhere in it, so it explains why the level moves without proving that this routine works.
The dials with the most behind them are the ones about size. A review of 25 studies covering 989 children (Buszard and colleagues, 2016) found that scaling equipment and the play area to the child came out well across those studies. Children preferred scaled equipment, were more engaged in the task and had greater confidence in their own ability to carry out the skill. Eighteen of the studies found they performed skills better with it.
The authors' own limitations matter more than usual here. Only a small number of those studies looked at learning over time instead of immediate performance, and the skills tests used few trials and sat a long way from real play. Every study in the review scaled the equipment for an age group and then left it that way. So none of it is evidence about changing something halfway through a game, which is the only thing this page is about, and the search behind the review stopped in February 2015.
Then the question of who should be doing the choosing, which is the part that needs the most care. Laboratory work has repeatedly reported that letting the learner pick the difficulty beats having it imposed. A laboratory study where people could choose the difficulty of each go (Andrieux, Danna and Thon, 2012) found better performance and accuracy on immediate and delayed retention tests for the group that chose. Then a follow-up that split the session in half (Andrieux, Boutin and Thon, 2016) found that choosing for part of the session beat choosing throughout.
Then the correction, which belongs in the same breath. A 2022 meta-analysis of 52 studies (McKay and colleagues) went back over that literature, 2,061 participants in total, and found the apparent benefit shrank once publication bias was modelled, with only the published studies showing it. Its conclusion is that the benefit of self-controlled practice on motor learning is small and not currently distinguishable from zero, with every sensitivity analysis converging on trivially small estimates.
What those three can and can't tell you, in one go. Both laboratory studies were screen-based interception tasks, with the 2012 one performed using a stylus on a digitizer. Neither of them was football and neither was a garden. Their published abstracts state neither how many people took part nor how old they were, so nothing here is known to be about children. The meta-analysis is an analysis of a literature and not a demonstration that giving a child a choice does no good. That's why this page hands you both the quiet change and the offered choice as two tools with different jobs, and doesn't name either one the right method.
Last, the number you've probably already seen. The eighty five percent rule (Wilson and colleagues, 2019) is where it comes from, and it's a mathematical result. A broad class of learning algorithms working on two-choice tasks learns fastest at about 85 percent accuracy, demonstrated on artificial neural networks.
So that's a result about learning algorithms and two-way choices. It isn't a study of children, and it has nothing to do with movement or with football. A child aiming at a target isn't making a two-way choice. It isn't a number to hit in your garden, which is why this page counts misses in a row instead. See how Our Kickabout researches its pages.
One notch back up
How Far to Turn It, and When to Turn It Back
Two things stop this becoming a slow slide into a game that asks nothing at all.
The first is waiting. Having turned a dial, leave everything alone for three goes before you touch anything again. Three goes is long enough to see whether it worked and short enough that you aren't sitting out a bad patch on principle.
The second is going back up the same way you came down. One notch, same dial, no announcement, once the three goes are up and they've gone from stretched to bored. That's how to make a kids football game harder again without it landing as a punishment for having done well, and it's the part almost nobody covers.
The changes English grassroots football made this season keep younger children in smaller formats for longer as they move up through the pathway, and bring in 3v3 as the entry format at under-7s. More time on the ball is among the stated aims. That's an announcement about organised match formats and not a study, and it changes the two things a parent at home mostly can't change, which are the size of the pitch and the number of other children. Scaling the game to fit the child is what the sport itself is deliberately doing, which is worth knowing while you're moving a cushion two feet closer.
The end state is a child who starts moving the dials without you, betting you they can do it from the fence. At that point the dials are theirs and your job is to agree.
Setting the level before you start is a different job, and the neighbours below carry the rules you fix in advance. The page on win conditions, what ends a round and what counts as a win, isn't published yet.
Sorting it against the neighbours
Where This Fits
Adjusting difficulty mid game in a garden sits next to five other pages here, and they overlap less than they look like they might.
The before-you-start version is the one to read if you'd rather build the game easy from the first whistle. It already carries the one-line instruction to shrink something, and this page starts where that instruction runs out.
The shooting ladder is the same idea as a machine: one target that steps up a rung when they hit it and down exactly one rung when they miss. It's the quickest way to see what adapting a game while you are playing looks like when a machine does the adapting, without having to run it yourself. A screen can react to every go, so the ladder moves faster than a parent should: out here the trigger is still three misses in a row, and a moved dial still stays put for three goes.
Target shooting is the offered choice in playable form, a game where the player picks which target to aim at on every single shot.
Scoring gets a page that owns the scoring dial properly, which is the one to read if that's the dial you keep reaching for. And the same problem with two children in it is a genuinely different problem with a different method behind it, which is why there's no second version of it here.
Quick answers
Common Questions About Adjusting Difficulty Mid Game
How do I make a football game easier for a child without them noticing?
Change something that belongs to you instead of something that belongs to them. Take one step closer while you're collecting the ball, or roll the next one along the ground instead of bouncing it. Both of those change how hard the game is, and neither looks like a decision that was made about them.
Should I tell my child I am making it easier?
Not in the middle of a run of misses, because that's the moment it lands as pity. The rest of the time, offering a choice lands better than either announcing a change or hiding one: two starting spots, both fine, and whichever they pick is the level.
How much easier should I make it, and how do I make a kids football game harder again?
One dial, one notch, then leave it alone for three goes so you can see whether it worked. Going back up works the same way, one notch on the same dial once those three goes are up, and the signal for it is boredom instead of a run of successes. There's a much-quoted percentage for how often a child should be succeeding; the research section above explains where that number actually comes from and why it doesn't belong in your garden.
Keep going
Where to Go From Here
Three of those neighbours are one click away, and any of them works perfectly well as tonight's five minutes instead of this one.
Want the tweaks you set before you start?
Five rules that make a game hard to get wrong in the first place, decided before the first ball is kicked.
Read the rule tweaksTwo children at very different levels?
Evening up two children without either of them noticing a handicap has been handed out is a method of its own.
Read about two kids at different levelsTonight's five minutes
One dial, one notch, and nothing said about it.
Pick the one you control, move it a single step while you are fetching the ball, then leave it alone for three goes and watch what happens.