Parents Who Go Too Far
Since their beginnings in the 1940s, organized youth sports have managed to become a part of life in America. Unfortunately, fun-based youth sports are now showing some signs that they may not last much longer. The most glaring weakness is a growing number of adults putting massive pressure on their children. Anyone who stays around youth athletics for a short time is sure to encounter a parent who seems to push their child too hard, demand too much of the coach and team, and justify their actions by saying they love their kids and want only the best for them. These people will stop at nothing to reach
their unrealistic goals. They berate their own children and the rest of the team for not performing at a professional level. They harass coaches and other parents, file lawsuits, and threaten league organizers if their child does not make the first string team. Often they will volunteer to coach the team, then use that position of authority to apply even more pressure. Having to face these sorts of problems is causing players and volunteers to leave youth sports organizations forever.
If you were to suggest to these overbearing adults that they were putting too much importance on a game, they would likely think you were joking. But it's no joke. Families lucky enough to change their habits before reaching a tragic end often express surprise at how easily and imperceptibly they came to be that way. The problem creeps up on the family, and those who aren't careful are quickly swept away. It is possible to avoid the trap if you examine some common sports myths and know some typical warning signs.
Myths of youth sports
Parents who are starting the downward spiral into obsession with their child's athletics invariably believe one or more of the following myths.
Sports make a great career.
This is the main reason that parents give for pushing their children too hard in youth sports. "If Johnny can turn pro, he will make a lot of money and we can all retire young and wealthy." The truth is, sports make a lousy career, and that goes double for soccer in America. Look at a few aspects of professional soccer.
The odds:
Professional soccer leagues have failed several times in this country, and there is no reason to believe that any will succeed in the near future. There are currently about 200 people who can be called professional soccer players in North America, actually making a living wage at it. There are maybe a few dozen non-player jobs that require actual soccer training. Nationally, there are probably fewer than 30 job openings in this sport each year. Since there are several million youth soccer players in the US, with the numbers growing every year, the odds of your child landing one of those jobs are nearly identical to your odds of winning a major lottery.
The commitment:
Entering the lottery is easy. Just hand over the money and you are in. A professional sports career takes a lot more than that. Top level recruiters will not even look at a player who has not taken the high-commitment route. Players must attend special camps, often for several months at a time.
Realistically, they must live away from home if they plan to become adequately trained. They must pay for private coaches and private tutors. They must own the best, most expensive equipment, play against the best opponents in the world, suffer huge physical, psychological, and emotional pressures, and shell out thousands of dollars. In addition, they must have total support from their entire family and must be totally dedicated to the sport. Even if a parent is willing to put himself and his child through all of that, he will still find that there are a thousand other parents who have done the same thing. That means another thousand kids are trying for those same 30 job openings in professional soccer.
The job description:
Travel. Play a game. Sit around and wait. That's it. The spare time is unbearable. What is there to do when you spend 20 hours of each day in a hotel room in some nondescript city? No wonder so many professional athletes turn to drugs. The boredom is incredible, and the salaries in American professional soccer are quite low. As you can easily see, a successful career in soccer is virtually impossible and of questionable value in this country.
Athletic ability will get my child a college scholarship.
Don't bet on it. Parents who say this are confusing big time sports like college football with small time sports like college soccer. Football programs are given multi-million-dollar budgets. Soccer programs are given T-shirts and socks. If all the soccer parents chip in, they might be able to paint lines on the field. Almost nobody gets a free ride through college on a soccer scholarship. The money is just not there. If the kids who base their futures on the dream of soccer scholarships would redirect half of their soccer energy toward their school homework, they would double their chances of receiving some of the billions of dollars available through academic scholarships. In addition, they would have an education to fall back on when they turn 28 and are considered too old for professional soccer.
Sports build character, sportsmanship, and self-esteem.
No serious student of sports still believes this cliche It seems that the intense spotlight on sports is able to highlight the character that exists in a child, but not alter it. As Heywood Hale Broun said, "Sports do not build character. They reveal it." An athlete may observe how he or she handles victory and defeat after each game, and change some personal habits as a result. But it is not the sport that makes this change. It is the athlete. They could just as well do this by observing victories and defeats in the classroom or around the dinner table. Any character that is built while participating in athletics would probably have been built just as well outside of athletics.
Similarly, children almost never learn sportsmanship by playing organized sports. If they pout after a loss or get smug after a win, or display good sportsmanship at all times, that is probably something they have learned at home. Occasionally they will meet a coach who guides them in controlling negative emotions, helping them exhibit a more positive attitude about the game. Once again, it is not the sport that caused the change. It is the influence of the coach. It could just as easily have been the influence of the person who hands out the grades at school or the paychecks at work. Any parent who goes into youth sports expecting to find a coach who will be a superb positive influence on their child's personality is heading for disappointment, because such coaches are scarce.
A child gains self-esteem by establishing and reaching realistic goals and by being praised by peers and authority figures like parents, teachers, and coaches. Sports offers many such opportunities, both in winning and in losing. But, if handled properly, most non-athletic experiences can have an equal effect on self-esteem. Self-esteem, like character and sportsmanship, are built internally.
Doing well in sports helps you do well in life.
This myth is being disproved nearly every day by one professional athlete or another. Certainly there are the grand old men and women of sports who have enjoyed additional success after finishing short, successful athletic careers. But for each story of success there is one of failure. For each Joe Dimaggio, there is a Jimmy Foxx. Jimmy hit 58 home runs in a single year, knocked in some hits that won the World Series, held several batting records, and earned $250,000 per year when that was an incredibly high baseball salary. Jimmy Foxx died a pauper, living in a shack. His only meals for the last years of his life were provided by his son, who had to drop out of high school and take a job to pay for food.
There are similar stories in all walks of life. For each wealthy businessman whose business is flourishing, there is some poor soul whose company failed. For each well-loved politician, there is another who is despised. There is no special magic to sports that keeps athletes from going down the road to failure, or moves them any faster up the road to success. The presence or absence of sports in one's life seems to have no connection to the outcome of that life. This is not to say that physical activity has no effect on longevity, because it certainly adds years to your life. However, the quality of those extra years is not based on whether that exercise was part of a professional athletic career or not.
Warning signs of overbearing parents
Parents who are starting the downward spiral into obsession with their child's athletics invariably exhibit one or more of the following symptoms.
They take seriously any coach who says their child has "potential."
All children have infinite potential, and this potential can be pointed in any direction. No one in the world can accurately tell which child will become a success in soccer. Anyone who claims to have that ability is probably trying to get you to give him a lot of money. Players develop at different speeds. One child may develop a good set of skills by age 8 and then stop improving altogether. Meanwhile, all of his teammates will continue to improve until they pass that level, leaving the early achiever far behind. Even mental toughness, one of the qualities a soccer career requires in abundance, comes in spurts. A player who seems to have the desire and drive at age 10 often loses interest by age 12. The onset of puberty and the sudden and natural discovery of the opposite sex have stopped more than one youth athlete from reaching the levels suggested by early success.
They tell themselves, "I know what is best for my child."
Any parent who uses this as an argument to put an unwilling child into a sport should stop and think. Though they probably can make better decisions than their child (mainly because kids haven't fully developed their decision making skills), neither the parent nor the child can possibly have enough evidence to make a sensible decision about which level of soccer the child should play. Usually, such a choice is made to meet the goals of the parent, not the child. This goes for parents who push their children into music, art, medicine, or law as well. These parents remind me of the revolutionary who preached to the crowd, "Comes the revolution, there will be wine flowing in the streets." A meek voice from the crowd responds, "But I don't like wine." The revolutionary says, "Comes the revolution, you'll like wine." Some parents are willing to shove sports down their child's throat, like it or not.
They tell others, "I want my child to have everything I never had as a child."
Admittedly, this is a characteristic of many parents, both in and outside of youth sports. It may even be a positive attitude in cases where, knowing that parents derive pleasure from his gains, a child develops a drive to succeed. Realistically, it is impossible to gratify more than a tiny fraction of our wishes, so this mechanism becomes abnormal when used to excess. In other words, truly believing it is possible to give a child everything the parents never had is unrealistic. If you stay with youth sports long enough, you will undoubtedly meet parents who never stop trying to reach the limit of this fantasy. Healthy parents know their limits.
They tell their child, "You will thank me later."
Just this morning, hundreds of children got out of bed at three o'clock so they wouldn't miss their five o'clock ice skating lessons. They all have one thing in common; a parent who dreams of the child in a professional hockey or figure skating career. In their mind, this brilliant career will be capped off by the player thanking their parents for everything. With the full support of highly paid coaches, these parents are willing to deprive their children of sleep and spend thousands of dollars to meet their own unrealistic goals. The truth is that concentrated training at an early age does not produce a better athlete. In fact, the most common result of early intensive training is a child who hangs up his or her skates before becoming a teenager, spending the rest of their life idle. They have seen the pain of athletics, and want no part of it.
Any parent who expects a child to thank them for this cruelty is somewhat out of touch with reality, and more than a little egotistical. Any joy the parent derives from parenting should appear during parenting, not after the child grows up. If the child brings additional joy after the job of parenting is done, that is an extra benefit, but the reasonable parent does not expect it.
They question the decisions of refs and coaches.
The coaches and officials in organized youth sports are both necessary and useful. The program could not exist without them, and their decisions are therefore beyond reproach. To question their choices is to question their very presence in the program. Even if you only do this mentally, without saying a word to anyone, you should feel guilty. A parent who thinks they could consistently make better decisions than the coach or ref, should be out there, volunteering to coach or ref.
Parents who are not willing to volunteer should leave the decisions to the people who are. One common result of parental interference in coaching is that qualified, competent coaches leave the sport forever. Obviously, this is bad for the sport. There comes a time when parents have to let their kids learn about life, and youth sports is a great start to learning valuable lessons besides how to pass, dribble, and shoot. Among the lessons learned by children in youth sports are:
o Not all coaches and referees are fair. This may ease the shock when they find out that not all bosses are fair.
o Coaches don't always have the time or inclination to worry about whether something they say might bruise a player's feelings. This may prepare them for a world that does not always have the time or inclination to worry about their feelings.
o No matter how wonderful mommy and daddy tell them they are, there are plenty of other kids just as wonderful. This will make it easier for their egos to handle the blow of the inevitable day they discover that mommy and daddy were wrong and they are not the center of the universe after all.
A child can learn lessons from any coach, whether that coach is perfect or not. Questioning that coach's methods and practices is denying the child a valuable learning experience.
How to avoid becoming an overbearing parent
The surest way to avoid becoming one of those parents that make youth sports difficult for other parents, coaches, players, organizers, and officials, is to be aware of the warning signs listed above. Check your attitude every month or so, and if any of the warning signs are detected, stop and think about the purpose of organized youth sports, which is to provide a safe, convenient, fun environment for the physical activity children require. It is equivalent to the swingset at any well-run day care center; a relatively safe place for the kids to play and have fun. Period. If you are expecting anything more from the program, then your expectations are unrealistically high. There is not much you can do about the parents who have already gone off the deep end, believing their 10-year-old Bobby is going to be the scoring leader in the next World Cup. Those people are living in a fantasy world, and unless you are trained in family counseling, you are powerless to change that. The most you can do is save yourself and your own children from this fate by keeping a realistic viewpoint.
