Judy Murray’s Powerful Parenting Message Leaves Tennis Fans Speechless as She Claims She Raised Andy to Think for Himself — Warning Against ‘Helicopter Parenting’
Judy Murray, 65, is a Scottish tennis coach and the mother of professional tennis players Jamie and Sir Andy Murray. Born in Dunblane in Stirlingshire, Scotland, she worked tirelessly to make tennis more widely accessible in Scotland. At the beginning of her son Andy’s international tennis success, she divorced her husband of 25 years in 2005. Murray was appointed an OBE in 2017 for her contributions to sport.
Here, she looks back on the moments that changed her perspective on parenting, money, friendship, and life in the public eye.
I definitely got my worries about money from my mum. When I was young, she would go into an absolute tailspin if she had a bill with a final demand on it, or if she’d forgotten to pay something. She was always panicking about money, and that rubbed off on me. And so I’ve never had a credit card. I hate owing people money, and I have to be really persuaded to invest in anything. I don’t have any investments, stocks and shares, or anything like that.
My parents were very keen sportspeople. My mum was a housewife, but she coached tennis on a Saturday. My dad was an optician, but before I was born, he was a professional footballer.
I was 10 when my mum and dad made the big financial decision to send me to a girls’ school. They wanted me to experience all the sporting opportunities they had there: badminton, tennis, netball. Going to that school really shaped me.
I turned down a scholarship in the US to play tennis. I was the best Junior in Scotland in my teens and won a place at the University of Virginia. In 1975, this was very uncommon. There was no internet, there were no mobile phones or ATMs. It was difficult to know what I would be getting myself into if I went that far away, so I turned it down.
I sometimes wonder what I could have done in tennis if I’d taken that opportunity. How might things have been different if I had been brave enough?
The first 18 months of being a mother were very hard. Jamie and Andy are 15 months apart. Just before Andy was born, we moved from Glasgow, where lots of my friends were, to Dunblane to be nearer to my parents. I was a sales rep for a confectionery company, and I realised I wasn’t able to do it with two of them. So the job went, and the company car went too. Suddenly, I was without friends. I felt trapped with these two little kids.
I went over to the tennis club to see what was going on, and I realised there were no opportunities for teenagers. I started to volunteer for just a couple of hours a week. I realised quite quickly that I enjoyed sharing my sport, so I got some more qualifications and created a mum’s army, lobbying for school teams. I just wanted to get myself out of the house for a couple of hours, and suddenly, it was the start of a career path.
I didn’t set out to raise sports stars – I just wanted my kids to enjoy sports. I did what my parents had done with me, which was play constantly in the garden; anything from French cricket, badminton, or tennis on the kitchen table. My sons had parents and grandparents who were all sporty and would play anything with them anytime they wanted.
I knew that by playing actively with them, which was also great fun, they could develop the hand and foot coordination skills that underpin all sports. If you do lots of that when they’re little, it doesn’t matter what sport they want to try; they will be able to do it pretty well. Nowadays, since screens have become such a huge part of our lives, I see that kids are coming into sports without those basic physical skills.
There is too much helicopter parenting happening now. You have to give children wings so they can fly, or they become overly dependent on their parents, and they aren’t able to think for themselves.
I tried not to do that with Jamie and Andy. They always got their own kit bag together. I used to create a laminated checklist, which I would leave on their bag when they were young. It wasn’t the end of the world if they forgot something, but they learned for themselves.
I would always take them to the supermarket and let them choose their own snacks, so they didn’t just see me as the person who does all that for them. We’ve got to prepare our kids to be able to solve their own problems, to think for themselves. Doing everything for them doesn’t prepare them to be responsible.
The toughest time financially was when we needed to send Andy to Barcelona for his training. It was 2002, and he was about 15. He was one of the best in Europe at that point. He needed to leave the country because he needed a tougher training environment with a different variety of sparring partners.
It was like going to an expensive boarding school that specialised in tennis. The problem was that we were going to need £30,000-35,000 a year. That was more than my entire salary.
It was incredibly financially stressful, and nobody prepares you for that. When your child starts out and they’re quite good, nobody says: “Look, it’s possible that in the next couple of years, you’re going to need a lot of money.” In the end, we got a £10,000 sponsorship, and I was lucky that my great-uncle left us some money that could pay for it. For a while, I didn’t think it was going to happen.
My pension was a big learning curve in my relationship with money. For most of my life, I didn’t have money. Even as a top-level national coach in 1995, I earned £25,000. It was a very small salary job. I have been self-employed for most of my life and didn’t start making pension contributions until much later. I didn’t think about it.
Everything changed in 2004 when we got off the plane at Edinburgh airport after Andy won the US Open Juniors. We could see flashing through the frosted glass automatic doors of the airport exit and realised it was flashing cameras. Andy asked: “What are they here for?” And I said: “ I think they’re here for you.”
Newspapers said I was this pushy, overbearing parent. We were getting such a hard time from the media. People who knew nothing about our lives or what we were trying to do. We were complete novices in the media world; we were just trying to learn as we went along. I took a PR and media course in 2006 to try and help us.
Strictly was one of the best experiences of my life. In 2014, looking back, it was the first thing that I had done for myself for many, many years. Everything has been geared to the tennis world, and trying to help my boys and my job as a national coach.
