Colman Noctor: Look no further than Katie if you want a role model for your children

Katie Taylor brought an extraordinary career to a momentous close in Croke Park on Saturday night, and if you wanted 

Katie Taylor celebrates following her undisputed super lightweight championship fight victory over Flora Pili at the Once Upon A Time fight night in Croke Park, Dublin. Picture: Stephen McCarthy/Sportsfile

If you are in the public eye, people will inevitably find reasons to criticise you. Success attracts critics, fame exposes flaws, and social media has become particularly adept at polarising views — those we admire and those we ridicule.

Yet Katie Taylor seems to be an exception.

She brought an extraordinary career to a momentous close in Croke Park on Saturday night. If you were looking for an example of how to carry yourself, I am not sure you could find a better one for your children.

Her win feels particularly significant as our children are growing up in a world with a very different understanding of what success looks like.

We have created a world of followers, likes, views, and personal brands where visibility is everything. You can’t just do something anymore — you have to broadcast it, and success is measured not only by what you have accomplished but also by how many people noticed you doing it.

Which is why Katie Taylor is so refreshing.

She became one of the most successful sportspeople this country has ever produced without ever seeming particularly interested in convincing us of her success. In an interview last week, Taylor described how she decided early in her career that rather than talking about herself, she let her “excellence do the talking”.

That statement captures an effective parenting philosophy for teaching children about values.

According to Taylor’s philosophy, if you are good at something, work at it, keep going when it gets difficult, do the work when nobody is watching, and don’t worry about making sure everybody knows you are doing it.

In interviews, she has reminded us that she “did not go to a fancy school” and that there is “no secret to success” — it came from hard work and perseverance.

In a world that seems obsessed with quick fixes and shortcuts, this message is becoming increasingly countercultural.

Courage to be different

What makes Taylor’s story even more remarkable is that the path she chose did not exist when she started as women’s boxing was not officially sanctioned in Ireland. She had to pretend to be a boy to get fights, and entered boxing gyms when the idea of a girl wanting to box was treated as a humorous novelty.

Katie Taylor did not simply become exceptionally good at boxing. She pursued an ambition that, at the time, many people thought a girl should not have and kept going until the world caught up.

Perhaps the most important part of Katie’s story is that now girls can walk through the doors of a boxing club and nobody wonders why they are there. Katie made that possible.

Our children need to understand an important distinction between achievement and legacy. Achievement is what you accomplish, but legacy is what becomes possible for someone else because of what you accomplished.

Another countercultural aspect of the Bray native is her faith. We live in an increasingly secular society where religious belief can sometimes be treated as old-fashioned, naïve or even embarrassing. Yet Taylor has never diluted or disguised this part of her life to make her public image more palatable.

Her Christian faith is clearly deeply personal to her, and she speaks about it openly without apology. That also takes a particular kind of courage. The willingness to say, “this is what I believe, and this is who I am”, even when those beliefs may not be fashionable.

You do not have to share Taylor’s faith to admire the integrity with which she lives it.

Perhaps that is another lesson worth passing on to our children: authenticity is not about broadcasting yourself to the world; it is having the confidence to stand by your values when the culture around you encourages something different.

We often tell children to “be themselves”, which sounds straightforward but it isn’t. Being yourself is only easy when the version of yourself you want to be is approved of by everybody else. It becomes much more difficult when people laugh at you, tell you that you don’t belong, or when nobody who looks like you is doing the thing you dream of doing.

Impressive form of strength

The paradox at the heart of Katie Taylor’s story is that she participates in one of the most physically aggressive sports imaginable, yet outside the ring, she appears remarkably gentle. Since the days of Muhammad Ali, boxing has always endorsed performative arrogance, yet Katie is remarkably humble and openly uncomfortable with attention.

There is something for our children to learn in that, too.

We often confuse strength with dominance. Strength can be associated with being louder, tougher, or more intimidating than others. Not only in sport, but in online culture, confidence is often performed brashly; certainty attracts attention, and outrage drives engagement.

But Katie Taylor demonstrates a far more impressive form of strength.

She has proven you can be formidable without being arrogant, and competitive without being cruel. You can be desperate to beat somebody without disrespecting them, and completely believe in yourself without constantly telling everybody else how good you are.

And, crucially, you can be powerful while remaining kind.

These distinctions matter because, as parents, we understandably spend a lot of time worrying about whether our children will succeed, yet far less time considering the kind of character they are developing.

Success and failure test and shape character.

Dr Phil Kieran: Katie Taylor is a good example for our children

I would encourage every parent to take a moment today and ask: Can my child win respectfully? Can my child lose graciously? Can they accept praise without believing they are more important than other people? Can they accept criticism? Can they celebrate someone else’s success? Can they keep working when there is no applause?

Integrity is difficult to measure, yet these questions will reveal many of the qualities that shape the kind of adult your child becomes.

Of course, we should be careful not to turn sportspeople into saints simply because they are successful. Our children don’t need perfect role models because perfect people don’t exist.

But they do need good examples, and our children can learn a lot from watching Katie Taylor. She shows us how to have the courage to pursue something even when other people don’t understand it.

Work hard, and you don’t always have to tell people how good you are. Stay humble when things go well and be gracious when they don’t. And never confuse kindness with weakness.

Last week, tens of thousands of people gathered in Croke Park, not to see a fight but to celebrate Katie Taylor as a fighter and a human.

She spent much of her career seemingly avoiding attracting attention to herself, but in the end, and rightly so, the attention found her anyway.

Perhaps that is the part of her story I would most want my own children to understand.

In a ‘Like and Subscribe’ world where we openly look for recognition, Katie has never said ‘look at me’. Instead, she has let her “excellence do the talking”, which made us watch what she could do and admire her unique style of doing it.

• Part three of child psychotherapist Dr Colman Noctor’s series on inclusivity will be published next week