What Actually Happens When You Step Into the Playground Together

In most junior sport programmes, parents are asked to wait outside. To drop off and come back. To stay behind the line, sit on the bench, watch from the car. There are understandable reasons for this. Coaches want to manage their environment. Children can behave differently when parents are present. And some parents, without meaning to, make things harder rather than easier.

In TigerTOTS, we do the opposite. Every session in the golfing playground is designed for a parent and child to navigate together. Not side by side in the passive sense. Together in the full sense: attempting the physical literacy challenges as a pair, exploring the golf games station by station, discovering what each one offers at their own pace. The parent does not coach. That is my job and the job of a trained TigerTOTS coach. But the parent is present, active, and genuinely involved in every moment.

This is not a logistical feature of the programme. It is the central design principle behind it. And understanding why requires understanding something about what very young children actually need in order to learn.

The attachment bond between a parent and a young child is the most powerful developmental relationship in a child's life. When a parent is present in a session, the child's entire experience of it is shaped by the parent's response. When the parent is curious and engaged, the child feels safe enough to explore. When the parent laughs at something, the child learns that making mistakes in this environment is acceptable. When the parent tries something difficult and does not immediately succeed, the child learns that trying difficult things is what people do. None of that comes from the coach. It comes from the person the child trusts most in the world, standing right beside them.

I want to say something directly to fathers here, because in my experience this is where TigerTOTS does something genuinely unique.

In the first eighteen months of a child's life, the bond with the mother is typically the strongest. It is built through feeding, through proximity, through the thousand small moments of physical care that fall disproportionately to mothers in those earliest weeks and months. This is not a judgement. It is simply the reality of how most families are structured and how infant development unfolds. By the time many fathers feel truly confident in their relationship with their child, a significant amount of bonding time has already passed.

The TigerTOTS playground changes that dynamic in a way I have watched play out in session after session. Physical play and shared physical challenge are among the most powerful contexts available for building a father-child bond. A dad who navigates the playground with his two-year-old, who crouches down at the balance station and tries it alongside them, who cheers when the ball reaches the target and tries again when it does not, is building something in that relationship that ordinary daily life rarely provides the space for. He is showing up, physically and emotionally, in a context where his child can see exactly what that looks like.

Some of the most moving moments I have witnessed in thirty years of coaching young children have happened not between a child and a club, but between a child and their dad. The father who had never felt quite confident around his toddler, who was not sure how to play with them or what to say, who arrived at the first session looking slightly out of his depth. And then something happens at one of the stations. The child succeeds at something. They look up. And the dad is right there, grinning at them, genuinely proud. That look is not manufactured. That moment is real. And it gets carried home.

I would encourage every dad who reads this to see TigerTOTS not as a golf programme for their child but as an opportunity for both of them. The golf is the vehicle. The relationship is the destination.

The value of parent participation in early years physical activity is not simply my instinct from thirty years of coaching, though it is that too. The research is consistent and compelling.

Studies examining the relationship between parent and child physical activity have found that when both parents are physically active, the likelihood of a child maintaining physical activity over time doubles for male children and increases between three and eight times for female children. A further review across multiple databases confirmed a significant positive association between parental physical activity and child physical activity levels across all age groups.

What this tells us is that the parent in the playground is not just supporting the child's enjoyment of today's session. They are shaping the child's relationship with physical activity across their entire life. The modelling effect of a parent who participates, who tries things, who shows that movement and challenge and occasionally not succeeding are all normal parts of a physical life, is one of the most powerful developmental forces available to us.

A systematic review of 82 studies on family-based physical activity interventions found that parents consistently described improvements in their individual relationships with their children, particularly in programmes that included a dedicated parent-child physical activity component. Parents described these experiences as opportunities for quality time and reported deepened bonds as a direct outcome. That is not a side effect of TigerTOTS. It is one of its most important deliverables.

For parents reading this who are either already in a TigerTOTS programme or thinking about joining one, I want to leave you with something practical.

What happens in the playground does not have to stay in the playground. The activities your child enjoyed most at each station can become part of ordinary play at home. Not practice. Play. There is a difference and children feel it immediately. Practice implies obligation and outcome. Play implies choice and enjoyment. Keep it in the play category and you will find your child asks for it rather than tolerates it.

You are a participant, not a supervisor. Your child is watching how you respond to difficulty, novelty, and failure just as much as they are watching what you do. Show them something worth watching.

The parent in the TigerTOTS playground is not a support act. They are, in many ways, the main event. The sessions are designed so that the coach can do their job well precisely because the parent is doing their job well alongside them. That is the whole design. And when it works, and it works every single week, what you see is not just a child learning about golf. You see a family, in motion, together.