Shawn Johnson is opening up about a parenting decision she wishes she had handled differently.
During an appearance on The Bossticks on Thursday, July 2, the Olympic gold medalist admitted that she and husband Andrew East accidentally pushed one of their children too hard after a coach encouraged them to fast-track the child’s athletic development.
“We have already learned firsthand and we’ve done it wrong already,” Johnson, 34, revealed. “I will openly say this, I burnt our one of our children from like a passion that they had because I drank the Kool-Aid.”
She explained that after a coach suggested their child needed to be placed on a faster development track, she bought into the idea. “I[I put] one of our kids, you know, in the fast track, and within a month, they were like, ‘I’m done.'” she recalled. “It just took it from being fun and from being a passion to being serious, and no kid needs to do something serious yet.”
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Now, Johnson says she and East, also 34, have completely shifted their approach. “We’ve just found that our job now is to say, ‘I’m so excited for you. How can I help you?'” East agreed, saying they’ve become much more intentional about encouraging their children without projecting their own ambitions onto them. “You have to give people space to figure out what they like and what they don’t like,” he said. “What I definitely don’t want to do is project my own thing… onto my kids.”
Elsewhere in the conversation, Johnson reflected on her own athletic career, explaining that she believes her age actually worked in her favor when she competed at the 2008 Olympics.
“I was 16,” she said. “I was not mature enough to be able to digest the magnitude of it, which I think was also a blessing.” She later attempted a comeback for the 2012 Games before retiring, saying that as she got older, she better understood the literal gravity of things.
Johnson became a household name at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, where she won four medals, including gold on the balance beam and silver in the all-around, team, and floor exercise competitions. She officially retired from gymnastics in 2012 after a knee injury ended her comeback bid.
She married East, who is a former NFL player, in April 2016, and the couple share three children: daughter Drew, 6, son Jett, 4, and son Barrett, 2