Once again, there's a few sports parents who could use some decaf
Cautionary tales about overinvolved parenting intensify here in youth sports season, nightly sagas of How Not To Act, all playing to a community theater near you.
Sadly, the summer of 2015 falls in lockstep precision with all the others.
The scene: This was one night last week. Perfect summer night for a ballgame. Given the winter we just endured, you'd have to lead the league in uptight to be uptight. Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack.
So it’s early in the game, a baseball game, and a kid makes a sparkling defensive play, saving at least two runs with a nice catch to end the inning. He's running to the dugout with his pals — that inspired, fired-up gallop of a kid who knows he's The Man even if for a fleeting moment — until he gets detoured. His father is standing along the fence near the dugout.
I am about 10 feet away.
The father proceeds to play 20 Questions with sonny, all pertaining to the kid's strikeout in the previous inning. He looked at a called third strike with two runners aboard. The pitcher had been wild and the pitch borderline. You could hardly blame the kid.
Check that: I could hardly blame the kid. Dad was in full lecture, as if the kid actually did something egregious, like flipping the umpire the old one-digit salute instead. People near me began elbowing me, as if to say, "Can you believe this?"
Finally, when the father was finished with his soliloquy, the kid retreated to the dugout. Smile gone. Excitement gone. He played that way the rest of the game, shoulders slumped, wearing a look that suggested he'd rather get stung by a wasp than be here.
Pause here to remember: Tournament game, summer night, for win or lose, not life or death. Sports. Kids. Toy department. Fun. That old thing.
I've seen that scene hundreds of times.
Again, I ask: Can some of these parents please try the green can? You know. Decaf. It's not your place to issue lectures in the middle of the game. That's why coaches coach, players play and parents root.
No question: we want what's best for our kids. But boundaries exist for everybody. And subjecting our kids to absurd standards — absurd because I've yet to see a Little Leaguer or Babe Ruth kid get drafted on site — you run the very real risk of opening wounds that don't heal.
I read a story Monday on slate.com about "helicopter" or hovering parents. It cited an alarming number of studies from college educators about how kids with overinvolved parents and rigidly structured childhoods suffer psychological ramifications in college.
Now I'm not suggesting there’s a cause-and-effect between a humorless dad fixated on a strikeout and his kid's future mental issues. But there's growing evidence of a correlation between helicopter parents and future problems.
As the author of the story, Julie Lythcott Haims, a former dean at Stanford, wrote: "the data emerging about the mental health of our kids only confirms the harm done by asking so little of them when it comes to life skills yet so much of them when it comes to adhering to the academic plans we’ve made for them."
I’d include "athletic plans" in that, too.
Haims writes: "As parents, our intentions are sound — more than sound: We love our kids fiercely and want only the very best for them. Yet, having succumbed to a combination of safety fears, a college admissions arms race, and perhaps our own needy ego, our sense of what is 'best' for our kids is completely out of whack."
Full disclosure: I see people like this all the time. Well-meaning and tone deaf.
I've suggested to a number of coaching friends the following strategy: No matter the sport you coach, the level or the gender of the kids, part of your coaching strategy must involve postgame, too. Translation: Instead of the kids leaving quickly with their parents and enduring the inevitable critique, be "proactive," as they say in educationspeak, and set up a postgame gathering.
Could be a cookout. Or at a restaurant. Keep the kids together, away from their parents, for as long as possible. Let the kids eat together. Celebrate. Commiserate. Laugh. Bust a few chops. It'll be significantly more positive, foster more espirt de corps and most importantly, shield them from inevitable negativity. By the time they get home, the parental monologues — hopefully — will be duller aches.
I understand this isn't always plausible. Wouldn't work on a school night. But for Friday night football, Friday night basketball and all summer youth sports, it's gold. And fun.
Meantime, let's heed the great Tony D’Angelo, proprietor of Tony D's in New London, who once gave me this advice about parenting and sports:
"Mikey," he said, "you go to the game, root for you kid and try not to be an (expletive)."
This is the opinion of Day sports columnist Mike DiMauro.
Twitter: @BCgenius
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