FOR PARENTS
How to Help Your Performer Prepare—Without Taking Over
You want them to do well. Of course you do. But audition preparation creates an interesting challenge for parents: your performer may need your help without needing you to manage the audition for them. The goal isn't to step away completely. It's to know where your help is useful—and where giving them ownership is even more useful.
Help create the conditions for them to succeed. Let them do the succeeding.
Know Where Your Help Helps
There are plenty of ways to make audition preparation easier for your performer without taking control of the work.
Helpful
- Help them understand schedules, deadlines and logistics.
- Make sure they have the materials and clothing they need.
- Help create time and space for them to practice.
- Listen when they ask for an audience or feedback.
- Help them find qualified guidance when they need it.
- Be the calm person when they're nervous.
Support the process. Don't become the process.
Let Them Own It
- Choosing how they want to perform the material.
- Making acting and performance choices.
- Doing the actual practicing.
- Talking with teachers, coaches or the audition team when they're capable of doing it themselves.
- Walking into the audition room and doing the work.
After the Audition, Let Them Land
When the audition is over, your performer may want to talk about every second of it—or may not want to talk about it at all. Give them a little room to decide.
Start simple. “How do you feel about it?” is usually more useful than immediately asking what the audition team said, who else auditioned or whether they think they got the part.
Praise the things they controlled. Preparation. Courage. Following through. Making strong choices. Recovering when something didn’t go exactly as planned. Those things matter regardless of the casting decision.
Save the notes for later. Resist the urge to immediately offer advice, corrections or well-meaning observations about what they could have done differently. Even helpful feedback can feel like judgment when the adrenaline is still wearing off. If they ask what you thought, listen first—and remember that not every observation needs to be shared.
Be careful with comparisons. Avoid comparing their audition to other performers, siblings, friends or even what you’ve seen them do before. Their job was to walk in and do their work—not to win the waiting room.
The audition is over. Give them space. Please don’t ask them to keep performing it for you.
Help Them Prepare. Let Them Perform.
The best support doesn’t remove every nerve or solve every problem. It helps your performer arrive prepared, confident and ready to do their own work.
If they could use some help getting there, that’s what coaching is for.