It is natural to assume that the people best placed to make a child active are the experts, the coaches and teachers and instructors with the right training and the right equipment. They matter, and the skills they teach are real, but they share one fundamental limit: they see your child for an hour here and there, in a setting built for a group. You see your child everywhere else, which is to say in almost all of the moments where the habit of being active is actually formed or lost. That makes you, whether you feel qualified or not, your child’s most important coach.

Connection is what makes activity stick

Part of what gives a parent this influence is connection. Children are more willing to move, and more confident when they do, when they feel understood and cared for by the people around them, and no one is better placed to provide that than family. When activity is something you share, a walk taken together, a game in the yard, a swim on the weekend, rather than something your child is dropped off to do alone, it carries a sense of belonging that makes a child want to return to it. The relationship is not incidental to the activity. For many children it is the reason they take part.

Presence, not expertise

Connection also works through example, often without anyone naming it. Children watch the people they look up to and quietly reason that if someone like them can do a thing, they can attempt it too. This is one of the reasons your own relationship with movement matters more than your skill at it. A parent who treats walking, gardening, dancing or swimming as a normal and pleasant part of life is teaching their child something durable about what an active life looks like, and they are teaching it most powerfully when the child sees themselves reflected in the parent. You do not have to be good at sport. You have to let your child see you moving and enjoying it.

This is also a reassuring way to understand your role, because it asks for presence rather than expertise. You do not need a coaching qualification or a sporting past to coach your child well in the sense that matters most. You need to be there, to be warm, to share the activity, and to let your own ordinary movement be visible. In our own programs we place parents at the centre for exactly this reason, and we have seen that when parents feel equipped to play this part, their children benefit.

If you would like a simple way to start, our one-page family plan turns these ideas into a few specific things to say, do and try with your child. This is the I of MAGIC, Interconnected, the reminder that being active is a shared thing. Pick one this week, do it alongside them, and let them see that being active is something your family does together.