Article by Grandmaster Boon Brown
Every generation has its dream sport. In the 1940s and 50s, every young boy wanted to be a baseball player. In the 70s and 80s, it was the NFL. Today? It’s the UFC.
None of these dreams are particularly rational. The highest earning potential for any young athlete has always been in golf. There are more teaching jobs at golf courses across the country than there are roster spots in football, baseball, and basketball combined, and even average golf pros earn good livings well into their 50s and 60s. But kids don’t dream about golf. They dream about the glamour, playing in front of millions, winning titles, getting endorsement deals. The lifestyle looks like the goal, so the lifestyle becomes the goal.
MMA is no different. When Dana White and his partners bought the UFC, it was nearly bankrupt. He standardized the rules, moved into pay-per-view, acquired competing promotions, and built it into one of the most-watched sporting events in the world. Then came The Ultimate Fighter on TV, and suddenly teenagers saw people their age training their way into the octagon, earning fame and money doing it.
Now your kid wants in. Here’s what you need to understand about why, and what to do about it.
The Ego Is Driving
Self-loathing, self-doubt, and the desperate desire to fit in are the fuels of adolescence, and they are almost entirely ego-driven. Most teenagers don’t realize how many of their worst decisions come from a place of ego. When a kid sees the UFC, he doesn’t see the years of grinding training, the injuries, the losses, or the damaged bodies. He sees himself with a championship belt. He hears his classmates saying “I wouldn’t mess with him.”
Here’s something teenagers think they understand but don’t: the poorest measurement of a person is their ability to cause physical harm to others.
I’ve worked in a psychiatric hospital. I’ve competed in countless martial arts tournaments. I can tell you that on any given day, any fighter can beat any other fighter. You can be a thousand times more prepared, better conditioned, technically superior, and still lose. That’s not cynicism, that’s just the reality of combat. If we’re going to let our kids define themselves by a physical trait, we are setting them up to become the sad person at 45 who can’t stop talking about their glory days.
We want our kids to judge themselves by traits they’ll carry their entire lives: compassion, humor, creativity, intelligence, and integrity. Not by how hard they can hit someone.
What the MMA World Actually Looks Like Up Close
I don’t say any of this from the outside. Our school became a licensed American Top Team MMA program for several years. I was drawn to ATT specifically because their founder, Ricardo Liborio, was a traditional martial artist who still demanded proper respect and etiquette from his fighters. No thug culture. No ego-driven nonsense.
Even so, what we encountered was revealing.
Liborio himself confided that many MMA fighters were prima donnas who expected free training and drained his time constantly. Another coach described them as constantly bickering. When our program grew, we started running background checks, and found that roughly half our MMA students had violent criminal histories. We removed them. I refuse to teach a man how to hurt people better if he’s already proven he will.
Rickson Gracie, one of the most decorated fighters in jiu-jitsu history, a retired UFC legend…said in a World Jiu-Jitsu Expo interview that MMA sets a bad example for young people and only attracts those drawn to barbarism. He called it a circus.
There’s also a serious medical dimension here. A University of Toronto study found that MMA fighters suffer traumatic brain injuries in nearly a third of professional bouts, a higher rate than in hockey, football, or boxing. The National Post described it as one of the first rigorous scientific analyses of MMA’s concussion dangers. Your kid’s brain is still developing. This matters.
Three Real Stories
Peter
Peter was a high school PE teacher…fit, athletic, confident. He came to us wanting to fight after six months of training. We stalled, counseled, and redirected as long as we could. He insisted. We finally arranged a kickboxing match. He was unconscious within the first few blows, stumbled through the rest of the round dazed, and hit the ground at the bell. On the ride home, he kept asking me when his fight was going to start. The ring doctor said, “They’re usually like this.” Peter never set foot in a martial arts school again.
“Tinkerbell”
A teenage girl came to us with a little TKD experience and a lot of enthusiasm. After one month she wanted her first fight. We told her she needed at least a year of training. She walked out, went to a competitor school, told them she was ready, and got knocked out on her first day by the head instructor. She left. Then she went to the roughest school in town. We lost track of her after that.
John
John trained with me from age 8, and by 18 he was one of the finest young martial artists I have ever seen — ground fighting, throws, boxing, acrobatics, speed, and power. World-champion caliber in any traditional competition. But the UFC called to him, and because I was steering him another direction, he left for a school that would give him fights.
He lost his first bout against someone who didn’t make weight…and his coaches told him to fight anyway. He won a second bout but felt terrible about it. In his third fight, he watched his opponent snort cocaine before stepping out, then walk through everything John threw at him.
John came back. He works with me now as an instructor. When his peers ask him about MMA, he tells them: “It hurts a whole lot worse than you think. The first time you get hit, your own internal voice asks you, ‘what the heck are you doing?’ It’s nothing like I imagined.”
“The thing that will make a difference in your life…the thing you’ll remember when you’re old…isn’t a fight you won or lost. It’s the lessons your instructor gave you. A traditional instructor is going to change your life more than any MMA coach who just wants to prep you to fight.” – John
What Traditional Training Actually Gives Them
There is a fundamental difference between an MMA coach and a traditional martial arts instructor. An MMA coach holds pads and calls out combinations. He wants to win. A traditional instructor teaches students how to navigate life through the lens of discipline, self-control, and emotional regulation. The goal isn’t a title belt. The goal is a better human being.
It’s also worth noting that every elite UFC fighter has a black belt in a traditional martial art before transitioning to MMA. Some MMA instructors call themselves Masters…but look closely, and you’ll find some who never earned a black belt. They just won some fights.
There’s also a self-defense reality that MMA ignores entirely. MMA trains you to win by the rules…a referee, a cage, a single opponent, timed rounds. Real danger doesn’t look like that. Real danger might be multiple attackers, a weapon, a parking lot with no witnesses. When your body is trained to fight by the rules, that’s what it defaults to in an emergency. Real self-defense training prepares people for survival, not competition.
For boys and young men, the primary reason to train martial arts today is self-control and discipline. A young man living responsibly should never be in a physical altercation…and if he is, it usually means he was somewhere he shouldn’t have been. The discipline instilled by traditional training helps him make better choices before it ever comes to that.
For girls and women, the stakes are more immediate. The likelihood of being physically attacked is real, and the attacker is statistically likely to be someone she knows and trusts. Training builds capability, yes…but more importantly, it builds presence. People who train carry themselves differently. Most attackers will simply choose someone else.
Your Job Is to Be the Parent
Your teenager’s ego is in control right now. That is not an insult…it is developmental reality. Until they are over 18 and making their own way, you have to be the adult in the room, making decisions based on wisdom they don’t have yet and experience they haven’t earned.
They will argue. They will roll their eyes. They will tell their friends they’re “doing MMA” because saying “I do karate” feels less cool. That’s fine…most of them will show up once, get wrecked by the workout, and quietly stop going. In our ATT program, someone threw up at nearly every first-timer session. Most signed up, got the shirt, did one class, and never came back.
The easiest and most powerful lesson you will ever teach your child is the example you set. If you let them quit when things get hard, you teach them to quit. My parents faced military service, the loss of a child, financial hardship, and everything life threw at them…and they never stopped fighting the good fight. That’s what I try to give my students, and what I hope you’ll give yours.
Traditional martial arts can be a remarkable gift for a young person. Give them that. They’re just asking for it in the wrong package.