What the 2026 Winter Olympics Can Teach Parents

Episode Summary: The 2026 Winter Olympics in Milano Cortina just wrapped up, and  and ski instructor and mom of five Jessica Averett was watching with a very specific lens. In this episode, Jessica pulls four powerful lessons from the Games and translates them directly into practical, usable advice for ski parents at every level. From Chloe Kim's mentorship of Gaon Choi, to Federica Brignone's comeback from injury, to Eileen Gu's refusal to let others define her success — the stories coming out of Italy have a lot to say about what really matters when you're teaching kids to ski.

What You'll Learn:

• Why your goal as a ski parent should be raising a skier who doesn't need you — and how to actually do it
• How your reaction to your child's falls shapes their relationship with risk for years
• Why regression is normal, how long comebacks take, and how to stay out of the way
• How to let your child define success on the mountain instead of imposing your own definition on them

• "The best thing you can do as a ski parent is raise a skier who eventually doesn't need you."
• "Every fall is a data point. Treat it like one."
• "A kid who makes it to the magic carpet and has a blast is building something worth more than dragging them up a chairlift before they're ready."
• "The comeback doesn't announce itself. It comes when the foundation is ready."
• "Your job is to create the conditions where your kid's version of success can happen — not impose yours on top of it."

Skiing with Kids is hosted by Jessica Averett, a ski instructor and mom of five who has spent more than 20 years helping kids learn to ski. This podcast helps parents create calmer, happier ski days by focusing on confidence, connection, and simple strategies that actually work with kids on the mountain.  She's the founder of First Tracks: A Parent's Guide to Teaching Kids to Ski, a course that walks parents through everything they need to know to skip overpriced ski school and confidently teach their own kids to ski.

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Transcript

0:02

Welcome to Skiing with Kids. I'm your host Jessica, a ski instructor, mom of five, and someone who's seen just about every ski day meltdown that you can imagine. After 20 years of teaching kids on the mountain, I've learned that great ski days aren't about perfect technique. They're about confidence, connection, and knowing what actually works. And this podcast is where we break it all down. Hey friends. Welcome back to Skiing with Kids. Now, during the last month and a half, I have been absolutely glued to the 2026 Winter Olympic and Paralympic games in Milana Corino. Now, if you watched any of it, and I really hope that you did. You know, it was incredible, right? We had some of the best winter athletes in the world competing in Italy, and I'm not gonna lie, I was watching a lot of it through the lens of being a ski parent, right? I'm sitting there like with my kids watching it, they're being inspired and I'm just thinking about, okay, all the different things that they could learn from watching these amazing athletes out there. And also because when you have the background that I do and you've spent, you know, the last 20 years teaching kids to ski, uh, I kind of start seeing like lessons that I can tie back to skiing everywhere. And this was really easy because obviously we have winter games here now. The whole time I just kept thinking that I had to do a podcast episode highlighting these games because there's so much there now. I don't wanna highlight the Olympic level skiing. Because we all know that was amazing and we're also inspired by that. But I wanna talk about, um, some of the lessons that we can learn from those games. Okay. Through their falls, um, their comebacks, the relationships with their mentors, because those things apply directly to skiing with your kids on a Saturday morning at your local mountain and to all the other things that they're doing in their lives because. Skiing can go so far beyond the mountain. So today we're going there. I'm gonna share four lessons straight out of Milano Cortina 2026, and connect them to what you're actually dealing with when you take your family's skiing. Okay, here we go. So a quick recap in case you need a little refresher. The 2026 Winter Olympic Games ran from February 6th to the 22nd in Italy, and it was spread across, um, the cities of Milan, Cortina, and a few other surrounding Mountainville venue and a few other surrounding mountain venues. Now there were nearly 3000 athletes. 116 events and if you didn't watch it, it was genuinely one of the most dramatic re winter games that I can remember recently. Right? We had a 17-year-old snowboarder crash twice and still come back to win the gold. Uh, there was a 41-year-old bobsled and she won her first Olympic gold on her fifth. The attempt. We had Italy's Frederica who tore her ACL, broke both bones in her legs less than a year before the games, and won the Super G at her home Olympics. Oh my gosh. I'm getting emotional just thinking about it guys. This was weeks after she returned to racing. We said, Eileen Goo become the most decorated free skier in Olympic history. It was incredible. Now, I'm gonna use four of these stories today because each one has something specific. To say to ski parents. Now this is probably not gonna be like inspirational poster stuff, but I think it's things that you can actually use right now. Let's start with the most talked about moment of the games, at least, um, you know, in the snow sports world. Okay, and that's Chloe Kim. Chloe Kim is an American snowboarding legend. She's a two-time Olympic, half p half-pipe gold medalist. And she was going for like that historic three-peat, and in the final she lost to her own mentee. Oh, you guys, I'm sorry. Like, I'm probably gonna get all choked up in these because this is also emotional for me. Um, and also having teenagers who work really hard in their own sport that so much of this hits close to home. So. 17-year-old gown choi. You guys, and I'm probably butchering names, I'm really, really sorry. I am not good with names, but Gown Choi of South Korea crashed in her first run. She had a really hard fall, um, bad enough that the medical staff came out to check her right there on the course. Um, then she went for a second run. Everyone's saying it's gonna be better, and she had another fall. Now, by every reasonable measure. Her. She was done right and then she dropped in for her third run. She posted, oh, I'm gonna cry. She posted a 90.25 and she won. Now, Chloe Kim, who had been a mentor to Choi for years, described the moment as a full circle moment she said, I have a saw, a mirror reflection of myself and my family, but here's the part that really got me, Chloe and her father. Had actually brought gown to the US to train at train at Mammoth Mountain, and that's the same mountain where Chloe grew up riding with Chloe's guidance, specifically around perfecting the basics that shaped gowns technique. She was the best of Korea, and then Chloe Kim came in and hugged her right after the final, she just got beaten by her own mentee. The one who that she was, who she was helping. She knocked her outta the record books. She was not gonna get her, her three-peat there. And Chloe Kim just gave her the biggest hug. Oh, so parents, what does that have to do with your own ski day? Because the best thing you can do as a parent is raise a skier who eventually doesn't need you. Now, if you have little kids, I dunno, that probably, you probably cannot even imagine that because you're like, I don't know. I feel like my kids are gonna need me forever. Guys, my oldest is 18, my youngest is eight. And whew, it goes fast. And it also sounds really simple, like, oh yeah, I want, I, I want my kids to not need me, need me. I want them to be independent. But look around you when you're on the mountain and look at how many parents are actually doing the opposite. They're like, so. Focused on every single run and so involved. They're coaching their kid literally at every turn, managing every choice for 'em, picking the trail, deciding the pace. Uh, they're telling the kids when to stop and those kids can ski, but they have learned to ski with you attached. They haven't learned to ski from that inside, from that like internal place. What Chloe Kim modeled is the whole arc of great mentorship. You pour into someone, you build the foundation, and then you let them go. And best of all, you cheer when they surpass you because that's the point. That's what you want skiing to look like for your kid in 10 years. Not just next weekend. Do you want them out there with you, like deciding their own runs, pushing their own limits, calling you over and saying, Hey, watch this. Get your camera out. You're gonna wanna film this. Then if you want that, your job right now is to build the foundation and then let it go. Now let's stay with Gown Choi for a second, because there's a second lesson in her story that I think is even more important for ski parents to learn. She crashed twice in the Olympic finals after her first crash. She said I cried because I thought I wouldn't be able to compete, but the thought kept coming back to me. You can do this, you have to go on. She fell twice in the most high pressure environment ever imaginable to anyone in her sport, and she came back. Now, I'm not gonna stand here and tell you that your 6-year-old just needs to toughen up when they fall. That's not, that's not the moral of the story here. But what I'm saying is that kids are developmentally different. Emotions are developmentally different and forcing a kid back up before they're ready. Usually makes things worse. But what I am saying is this, how you respond to your child's fall is going to shape how they understand how falling works, right? If every fall is like a huge event, if it triggers a panic attack in you, if it gets treated like a major injury, whether or not anything is really seriously injured, if your energy shifts as a parent dramatically in the moment they go down. Your kid is gonna internalize that falling is serious, potentially really dangerous, and they need to be scared. And on skis where falling is totally normal, expected, and often kind of funny, that fear becomes a real problem. Now here's what I try to do and what I teach parents to do before the fall happens with your kid, normalize it. Talk about it on the drive up. Say, Hey, we might fall today. Falling is part of skiing. Here's how we fall safely. Hands out. Don't grab your poles on the way down. Make it a matter of fact for our kids. We tell 'em, Hey, the best way to learn is by falling. If you fall, that means you're trying something hard. And then mom and dad, when that fall happens. Read the room before you react. Is there something actually wrong or are they doing a check-in on your face and your emotions to see how scared they need to be? Because that face check happens in like half a second and your reaction is the answer they're looking for. Now gown Choi went down in front of literally the entire world. She cried and she chose to go again. Her resilience was built literally over years of training falls in practice with people around her who treated falling as something that she could learn from. Not a catastrophe. As a parent, you're building on the same thing, right on the bunny hill. That first green, um, that first really cold day of the season. Every fall is a data point, so treat it like something you can learn from. Now the next lesson we're gonna learn is from Federica Briney. I'm totally butchering her name. I'm so sorry, but if you don't know her, she is an Italian alpine ski racer and at the 2026 games, which were held in her home country, she won the gold in the Super G. Now, for much of the last year, it wasn't clear if she was going to be able to compete at her home Olympics at all. She came away with gold. In the women's super G following a year, spent largely in rehab after breaking multiple bones in her leg, only returning last the month before the Olympics. Now she became at 35, the oldest female gold medalist in women's alpine skiing. That is amazing. You guys. The home crowd in Cortina literally lost their minds, and it is one of the most amazing things. You have to go watch it if you missed it. Now let's talk about why this matters to you as a ski parent, other than the fact, the fact that you might just think maybe I could win the Olympics because she was older and I'm older, and let's see what we can do now. Let's relate it to your kids though. Kids regress, and I don't know why we don't talk about this more, but it's totally normal and it's really common right now. A kid who was skiing blues at the end of. This season might show up in November acting like they've never seen snow or still kind of remembering how to do their pizza. Now a kid who was fearless at seven suddenly gets scared at nine and maybe a kid who loves skiing for two seasons suddenly decides, you know, I'm not a skier, and mom and dad panic. What happened? Did we do something wrong? Uh, was it something I forgot about? I can't remember. No. Maybe you guys, sometimes there's a reason. But a lot of the time regression is just how development works in kids. They consolidate, they plateau, they get scared of things that they weren't scared of before. As their awareness of risk grows, it's not linear and it's not permanent. Now Frederica, BNE spent almost a full year unable to race. She came back a month before the Olympics and won gold. Now that comeback doesn't announce itself. It doesn't come with a schedule. It comes when that foundation is solid and the timing is right. Your job as a ski parent when your kid is regressing is not to push harder. It's to hold the positive association with skiing, and then wait for the timing. Keep going to the mountain. Keep making things fun. Ski the easy stuff together. Celebrate the winds, laugh, drink ridiculous amounts of hot chocolate. Let them set the pace. The comeback is coming. You can't rush the timing though. Now I wanna close. My fourth lesson that I wanna learn is about Eileen Goo. I love this woman so much. At the 2022 Beijing Olympics, Eileen Goo won gold in big air, gold in the halfpipe and silver in the slope style. This was when she was 18, you guys, 18 years old. She was like electric. She came to Milano Corino at 22. And the pressure was enormous. Could she repeat it? Goose's performance at the games was great. It showed technical mastery, big air flare, and she became the most decorated freestyle skier in Olympic history. She won three medals, including her half-pipe gold on the last day of the games. But here's what I wanna highlight. Early in the games before the halfpipe, half before the halfpipe, a journalist asked Eileen whether the two silver medals felt like two gold medals lost. She pushed back directly saying, winning a medal at the Olympics is a life-changing experience for every athlete. Doing it five times is exponentially harder because every medal is equally hard for me. But everyone else's expectations rise. Oh my gosh. She is so like, she's wise beyond her years guys. She refused to let someone else's expectation of her, or almost the entire world's expectation of her define her experience. And I want you to sit with that for a little bit as a ski parent. Okay. Because one of the most common things I see, and honestly one of the things that I think does the most damage to kids' long-term relationship with skiing is parents who have a very specific definition of what a good ski day looks like. And when the day doesn't match that definition, they can't hide that disappointment. Right? I mean, they're not meaning to guys. I mean, as parents, we, we have these ideas of how things are gonna go and when they don't happen, we get a little frustrated now. That doesn't mean you're a bad parent, but it can be hard when you're like, my kid only made it to the magic carpet once and we only spent 30 minutes on the snow. Or maybe they got on the chairlift, but they only wanted to go for like 45 minutes and then they cried or they refused to do the trail that you knew they could do even though just 'cause they were frustrated. Right. And out there on the mountain when the parent feels dis disappointed, the kid feels it. And I wanna invite you to get really honest with yourself about what success looks like on a ski day with your kids. Is it vertical feet number of runs the trail color you're skiing? Or is it, Hey, did my kid feel safe? Did they laugh? Do they wanna go back? Because here's the thing. A kid who makes it to the magic carpet and has a blast is building a positive association with skiing, and that is worth more than dragging them up a chairlift before they're ready and checking a box. Eileen Guo decided that what winning looked like to her, your kid needs a chance to do the same. And your job as a pa, a ski parent, is to create the conditions where their version of success can happen. Not impose yours on top of it. So here's what I want you to take away from the 2026 Winter Olympic Games, from Chloe Kim to Dao Choi. Build the foundation and then let go. Your goal is a kid who has fun skiing independently and joyfully, not a kid who can ski because you are there to direct everything for. For them. Okay. From Ga Gown Choi herself, how you respond to falls teaches your kid how to feel about falling and about things that can feel like a failure. Normalize it before it happens. Stay calm when it does. That resilience is built in the parking lot and on the bunny hill, not on top of the podium from Frederica. Regression is not failure. Comebacks, take time. Keep the association positive. Hold the line on fun, and trust the process and timing. And from Eileen Goo, let your kid define success. A great day on the mountain is whatever your major kid feel, safe, capable, and made them wanna come back, period. Now the Olympics always remind me why I got into this work. It's not because I'm great at saying people's names clearly, but like when you strip away all the pressure and the medals and the noise, what you're left with is this athletes who love a sport so much that they gave everything to it. Now that love started somewhere, it started small. It started with someone who made it feel possible. You're that person for your kid, not the Olympic coach, not the ski instructor. You every single time you take them to the mountain and make it a good day, you are planting something. You are building up The kid who might someday get on a chairlift alone for the first time, or ski that run that scares them, or maybe they're gonna be the ones who come back after a bad season and find their ski legs again. Those milestones start with you. It starts the next time you go up there to the hill, starts in the parking lot before you even put on your boots. Now, if you want a real plan for that, a step-by-step approach to teaching your kids. From someone who's had 20 years of experience and raised five ski kids, kids of her own, that's me. Check the show notes. Okay. That's where you're gonna find the link to First Tracks, A Parent's Guide to Teaching Kids to Ski. Thanks so much for joining me today. I'm so excited to hear about all the progress you make with your own ski kids, and I will see you out there on the mountain.