Twelve little girls sit around a table covered in paper plates and confetti. Decked out in sparkly outfits and party hats, they watch as the lights are shut off, cuing their small voices to swell in the lyrics of "Happy Birthday". After the merriment and the blowing out of candles, slices of cake are cut and passed around. No one takes a single bite. This is the kind of culture that gymnastics often creates. I look back on a nutrition seminar that my gym held when I was only seven years old and the attentive eyes of my friends watching as we were implored to think twice about eating cake at birthday parties. Have you been eating well this week? Is this a healthy food? We were told to ask ourselves questions, and though it was a two-minute moment a decade ago, I'm reminded of that every time I go to a birthday and every time I hear a coach say something like this to a young child. It's a perfect example of the psychological effects that toxic gymnastics culture can have of young female gymnasts' psyches. What happened at that table was about the installation of a toxic belief system. It tells a seven-year-old girl that her body is something to be managed and that unabashed pleasure shouldn’t be guiltless. It’s instilled in her that, wherever she is, she’s being measured against this imposed standard. It’s one moment plus a decade of practices, meets, and offhand comments. This is something that sport psychology researchers have only in the last twenty years started to name properly: the internalization of coach-transmitted harmful beliefs, and the developmental cost of growing up inside a strict, appearance-focused athletic culture. It isn’t a few bad coaches, it's a system. Elite and competitive female artistic gymnastics occupies a strange developmental niche. Unlike most sports, its athletes peak physically before puberty and are often pushed hardest during the exact years, roughly ages 6 to 14, when identity, body image, and self-concept are most malleable. Developmental psychologists call this a period of heightened plasticity: children absorb the framing adults give them about their bodies and abilities and use it to build their sense of self, often without the cognitive tools to question it. Gymnastics culture has historically capitalized on this plasticity rather than protecting it. Researchers studying "high-performance" youth sport environments (Sarah, Kerr, and Stirling's work at the University of Toronto is relevant here) have described a set of controlling coaching behaviors that recur across gymnastics programs internationally: conditional regard (love and approval that are taken away with “inadequate” performance), excessive personal control (surveillance of food, sleep, and body composition), and intimidation framed as "toughness." None of these require a coach to be overtly evil, most of this can be delivered as care. That normalization is what makes this so hard to pin down and combat. When a child spends her most formative years inside this framework, several overlapping psychological patterns tend to emerge because the environment is designed, intentionally or not, to produce them. A common one is disordered eating and body surveillance. The harmful nutrition-seminars aren't outliers. Gymnastics has one of the highest documented rates of disordered eating among youth sports, closely tied to what researchers call RED-S (Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport) (a condition where inadequate fueling for training demand disrupts hormonal, bone, and metabolic health). But the psychological residue outlasts the physical. Girls learn to treat hunger as something to be overridden rather than a signal they have to trust. That habit, once learned, doesn't stay in the gym. It follows a person into every future relationship with food. Another facet of the culture is perfectionism as identity. Clinical researchers distinguish between healthy striving and maladaptive perfectionism, the belief that one's worth is contingent entirely on flawless performance. Gymnastics, usually scored out of a perfect 10, structurally rewards this belief. Athletes internalize the idea that mistakes are indictments of self-worth. This frequently persists as generalized anxiety and self-criticism well beyond retirement from the sport. Because coaches often function as authority figures over many domains of a child's existence (diet, rest, medical decisions, emotional expression), enmeshment and impaired autonomy, especially for higher-level athletes that may be homeschooled and spending hours in the gym as most of their source of developmental learning, are incredibly common and problematic. Many gymnasts report difficulty, as adults, distinguishing their own preferences from what an authority figure wants of them. This shows up later as difficulty setting boundaries, chronic people-pleasing, or paradoxically, sharp overcorrection into rigid control in other areas of life. In therapeutic literature on developmental trauma, "fawning" describes appeasement behavior learned in response to an unpredictable or punishing authority figure. Former gymnasts frequently describe a felt sense of dread walking into the gym. This isn't fear of the skills, but fear of the coach's mood, that they later recognize as a trauma response, one that can generalize to bosses, partners, and other authority figures for years afterward. Because so much of this culture is normalized as good coaching, identification requires learning to see past the language of discipline to the function underneath it. In the environment, warning signs include: - Weight or body comments disconnected from actual performance metrics ("you look like an elephant" rather than feedback about a skill). - Praise and attention that visibly track a child's body rather than her effort or improvement. - Secrecy around food, including girls hiding snacks, apologizing for eating, or condemning other girls for their eating habits. - Coaches using shame, silence, or withdrawal of attention as primary tools of correction. - A culture where injuries or fatigue are treated as moral failures ("mental toughness"). In oneself, years later, the signs often look like: - Reflexive guilt around food that has no clear present-day source. - Difficulty resting or guilt without a sense of having "earned" it. - A harsh internal voice, perhaps that’s reminiscent of a coach from even twenty years ago. - Body image that fluctuates based on performance in unrelated areas of life (work, relationships). - Discomfort receiving praise that isn't tied to visible achievement or self-discipline. None of this indicts gymnastics itself. I fell in love with the sport that builds extraordinary discipline, awareness, and community. The problem is a culture, and those can be redesigned. Several shifts are already underway in parts of the sport, and more are needed. This includes decoupling feedback from body commentary, coach education programs that train staff to give performance feedback that references skill mechanics, not physique, and athlete-centered coaching implementations, which center athlete voice and consent, allowing gymnasts input into training decisions rather than treating them as passive bodies to be molded. Gyms might also consider integrated sport psychology. Programs that embed licensed sport psychologists as a routine, non-stigmatized part of training and not something reserved for "problem" athletes normalize addressing the mental side of the sport with the same seriousness as the physical. Just as important would be mandatory, well-informed coach certification. Education that goes beyond "don't say this word" and instead helps coaches understand the stakes of what they say to children in their most formative years. On another side of things, parent literacy is incredibly important. Parents are often the least equipped as they don't recognize concerning coaching language because it mirrors what they, too, experienced or absorbed as "normal" sport culture. Insensitive responses to children seeking help can also exacerbate any negative effects. Educating parents on what controlling coaching behavior looks like empowers them to intervene and teaching about resources can equip them to be there for their athlete. Perhaps most importantly, building a culture where a gymnast's worth as a person is never allowed to fuse with her worth as an athlete, so that stepping away from the sport, for any reason, is never experienced as a personal failure. The girl at that birthday table who doesn't touch her cake isn't doing anything wrong. She's responding, with perfect logic, to everything she has been taught. Changing the response means changing the lesson.