"You're brilliant at this."
It hands over a title, and a title has to be defended on the very next go. Swap in the thing you saw: "That one went exactly where you looked."
What to Say During Play (and When to Say Nothing)
Parent Play Style
Most of us can hear ourselves talking through the whole five minutes. The words themselves are rarely the problem. It is the quantity of them and the timing of them, and both of those are fixable tonight, without learning a single new phrase or reading anything else first.
So what to say during play is really four decisions. How much to say, what to say at each of the five moments a short session has, how to word a cue so it points at something outside your child's body, and which well-meant lines land badly. The first one carries most of the weight: one sentence per go, dropped into the gap after the ball has stopped. For a long time I thought a quiet garden meant no help was happening, and it was the other way round.
One sentence per go
How Much to Say Is Most of the Answer
If you change one thing about what to say during play, change the amount of it. One short sentence of help per attempt, and no second one before the next attempt starts. That is the whole rule, and it is checkable in a way that "say less" never is: count the sentences of help in a single go, and if there were two, the second one was for you.
Parents usually ask how much they should talk during kids' football as though there is a right number of phrases to learn. There is a right number of sentences of help instead, and it is one. Timing does more work than wording here. A sentence that arrives while your child is mid-run has to be dealt with at the same moment as the run itself, so the help competes with the thing it was meant to help. The slot that works is the two or three seconds after the ball stops and before somebody goes to collect it.
The opener: "Shall we see how many we can do before the ball touches the fence?"
Then, once the ball has stopped: "That one stayed low."
The uncomfortable part is worth saying out loud. A quiet garden feels like neglect for about a week. Then it stops feeling like anything at all, and you start noticing how much your child says when there's room left for them to say it.
In the order they happen
Five Moments, Five Sentences
Most advice about what to say to your child during football practice is organised by sentiment: encouraging things, positive things, things that build confidence. A five-minute kickabout in a garden is not organised by sentiment. It runs on the clock, and it has five moments in it, always in the same order. Here is one sentence for each of them.
- 1
The invitation. Small, optional and specific, before anyone has committed to anything. "Shall we do five minutes in the garden before tea?" The size of the ask is the whole trick: five minutes is easy to say yes to, and an hour is not.
- 2
The first go. Say what the game is, once, and then let it start badly. "First one's just to see where it goes." Nothing about technique before your child has touched the ball, however obviously fixable the technique already looks.
- 3
The middle. This one wants silence more than it wants words. One sentence per go, in the gap, describing what happened instead of rating it: "That one bounced twice." If nothing needs saying, say nothing and let the next go start on its own.
- 4
The moment it works. Name the thing you saw instead of handing over a verdict. "You slowed it down before you hit it." A child can repeat a description; nobody can repeat "brilliant".
- 5
The finish. One sentence, decided before the mood turns, and no post-match analysis on the way indoors. "Let's stop while it's still good." Endings are their own subject, and this page leaves them there.
Nobody gets all five right in one session, and there's no need to. If only one of them ever lands, make it the middle one. It takes up four of the five minutes, and it's the moment where the talking quietly piles up.
The test for a good cue
Point the Words at the Ball, Not the Body
Once you are down to one sentence per go, the only question left is what goes in it. The test takes a second, and it is whether somebody standing at the fence could see the thing you just named.
The fence test. "Roll it into the gap by the pot" passes, because a stranger at the fence could point at the gap. "Lock your ankle" fails, because it names something only your child can feel. "Concentrate" fails hardest of all, because it names nothing.
The reason is plain enough once it is said out loud. A target you can point at is something a child can aim at immediately. A body instruction has to be translated first, into a feeling they may not have had yet, and that translation is happening in the same second as the kick.
It also survives contact with a real garden. Gaps, pots, fence panels, the bin, the crack across the patio: every one of them is a target, and none of them needs a coaching vocabulary to describe. When the ball goes somewhere odd, don't name a different body part. Name a different target.
The first of the moments this page deliberately doesn't cover in full is the one straight after a miss. The mistake-proof games page already carries the fuller list for the moment after a miss, the instead-of and try-this version, plus a tool that hands you one sentence for whichever thing went wrong. There's nothing to gain from printing it twice.
The ones I still catch myself using
Three Well-Meant Lines That Land Badly
Lists of what not to say to your child when playing sport are usually about shouting, and shouting is the easy one to spot. These three are harder, because they are kind, and because they come out on their own before anybody has decided to say them.
"Unlucky!"
Said kindly, it renames a skill problem as bad luck, which leaves your child nothing to do differently. Swap in something changeable: "It's rolling left, so want to start a step closer?"
"Watch me, like this."
It turns a game into a lesson and hands the ball to the adult, usually at the exact moment a child was about to try again on their own. Swap in a question: "Do you want a go at it your way first?"
None of the three ruins anything, and that's worth saying plainly. The long-term study of parent praise in the next section looked for a link between praising a child for being clever and a fixed view of ability, and did not find one. So nothing here says these lines do harm. What the same study did find is that praising effort predicted a later belief that ability can be built. None of the swaps here is effort praise, though, so that finding is not what recommends them. The case for the swaps is the one made above: each leaves your child something to do next. The alternative costs nothing.
Four studies, none of them about your garden
What the Research Actually Says About Parent Words
Four studies bear on any of this, and not one of them was run in a back garden with a five-year-old. That is worth knowing before any of it gets used.
Wording changed how well children learned a skill. Tapan and colleagues (2023) split 60 children aged 9 to 10 into three groups of twenty and coached them for eight weeks. One group got instructions that pointed at something outside the body, such as turning a shoulder towards the net pole; one got instructions that pointed at the body itself, such as taking a shoulder back; one got neither. On the skill test, the study on external and internal cues in children's tennis put the outside-the-body group significantly ahead, both straight after the eight weeks and at a retention test two weeks later. It is tennis, the children are older than this site's band, and it is eight weeks of structured coaching, so it supports how a cue is worded and promises nothing about five minutes in a garden.
Children asked for less instruction, not more. When Knight and colleagues (2010) asked junior players what they wanted parents to say, the 42 tennis players involved, averaging 13.5 years, said they did not want technical or tactical advice and preferred comments on effort and attitude. Those are competitive teenagers at tournaments describing a preference, not an outcome anybody measured, and none of them was five.
Encouragement itself does something, and it is not the same thing as instruction. Aydi and colleagues (2022) ran a dribbling circuit with and without encouragement, where the encouragement was content-free ("Go Go Go, Again Again", "More effort") rather than instructional. With it, the students covered more ground, worked harder and rated the session as more enjoyable rather than less. That was 20 male secondary school students averaging almost eighteen in a PE lesson with their teacher, so the direction travels and none of the numbers describes a child.
Praise type has a long tail, and the evidence is one-sided. Gunderson and colleagues (2013) followed up praise recorded in 53 family homes when the children were 14 to 38 months old, and found that praise for effort predicted a later belief that ability can be built. Early praise for being clever or able was not linked to the opposite belief. It is toddlers at home, with mindset measured at 7 to 8 years and nothing to do with football, and that second half is exactly why this page does not tell anyone off for saying "well done".
One last thing, which is not a study at all. England Football's Silent Support Weekend asks spectators at grassroots matches to hold back the shouting and the calling out while keeping the applause, and England Football reported 943,269 players signed up for the 2025 weekend. It is a campaign with a rationale, no published evaluation of it was found, and a match with a touchline is not a garden. It sits here as a fact about what English grassroots football asked of adults for one weekend, and nothing more than that. See how Our Kickabout researches its pages.
The awkward ones, in one place
Where Each Tricky Moment Has Its Own Page
This page is about the talking in general. Several specific moments have already been worked out properly elsewhere on the site, and each of those pages goes further than a paragraph here ever could.
For the moment straight after a miss, there is a full swap list and a fixer that hands you one sentence for whichever thing went wrong. For when indoor play gets wild and the words have to hold a line, there is one neutral sentence said the same calm way every time. For a child who flinches at the ball, there is an opening line repeated deliberately across a week so that nothing reads as a countdown.
For a child who says they are rubbish at football, there is a reply that neither argues with them nor agrees. For keeping score talk out of it, there are the two framing phrases that decide whether a game feels like a contest before anyone has kicked anything. And for two children at different levels inside the same five minutes, there is a way to keep both of them busy without commentating on either.
One more is on the way. A page about putting all of this inside a whole training plan isn't live yet.
Quick answers
Common Questions About What to Say During Play
How much should I talk while we play?
One short sentence per go, said after the ball has stopped instead of while your child is still moving. A second sentence in the same go is almost always for you. If you want a number for how many sentences of help to give during kids' football, that is the number, and it is one.
Is it bad to say "well done"?
No. Lists of what not to say to your child when playing sport tend to put "well done" near the top, which is harsher than it needs to be. It's only thinner than naming the thing you saw, and the thing you saw is the bit a child can go and do again on purpose.
What should I say when my child keeps missing?
Change something they can see instead of something they have to feel, then say one sentence about the ball or the target. Start a step closer, or make the gap wider. The full version of that moment is on the mistake-proof football games page.
Should I just stay silent the whole time?
No, and the research points the other way on encouragement, though it settles nothing about timing: the encouragement in that study ran right through the movement. What is worth cutting is running instruction during a go, not the cheerful noise between goes. Silence is a tool for the middle of a go, not a policy for the session.
Keep going
Where to Go From Here
Everything above is one page's worth of a much bigger habit, and none of it has to be learned in order, so go with whichever of the three below is closest to your last session. If the site is new to you, start at the front door instead of this page's method. If the moment that keeps catching you out is the one straight after a miss, that has a page of its own with a proper swap list on it. And if what you want tonight is something to try the words on, a five-minute game will do more for you than another paragraph about talking.
New to all this?
The front door explains how five minutes of play works before any of the wording starts to matter.
Start hereWant the after-a-miss version in full?
The whole swap list for the moment a shot goes wrong, plus a fixer that hands you one sentence at a time.
Read the mistake-proof football games pageNeed a game to try the words on tonight?
Pick a five-minute game and use the one-sentence rule inside it. Nothing else about the game changes.
See the 5-minute gamesTonight's five minutes
Say one thing per go, and see what the quiet does
Pick the one moment you always talk through, and this time leave the sentence until the ball has stopped.