I picked youth soccer because I’m close to it.\u00a0 I have a daughter that we shuttle all over New England for practice and games.\u00a0 One and a half hours north for practice, twice a week.\u00a0 Five hours south for a two day tournament.\u00a0 You know how it works.\u00a0 Millions of parents do this.\u00a0 But why do we do it and what do we expect from it?\u00a0 Let’s talk about that.<\/p>\n
When I grew up, both my parents worked.\u00a0 My father would leave on Monday morning and not be back until Friday night.\u00a0 He worked construction.\u00a0 He traveled to where the work was.\u00a0 My mother worked the morning\u00a0shift in a plastics factory.\u00a0\u00a0Not only\u00a0did they not have the time or the energy to shuttle me or my four siblings around, they never saw the need.\u00a0 On afternoons after school, we “played”.\u00a0 During the summer, we played.\u00a0 Not soccer practice, not dance class, not gymnastics.\u00a0 We just played.\u00a0 Sure we had school sports but that was the extent of our structured activities.\u00a0 Oh yeah, we had Little League Baseball.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Today’s youth have so many activities that they can participate in.\u00a0 But is a structured session, teaching technique and skills really playing?\u00a0 Is it learning? Sometimes I wonder.\u00a0 I remember that the walk from the bottom of my driveway to my front door could take hours.\u00a0 but it was only 100 yards!\u00a0 We had the freedom to walk in the woods and around our pond.\u00a0 We explored and made up things to do.\u00a0 Ourselves.\u00a0 I know it’s a different world now.\u00a0 We all have those “safety” concerns.\u00a0 But what do our kids learn from the organized activities?\u00a0 Do they learn to use and develop their imagination?\u00a0 Do they learn skills they can put to use later in life?\u00a0 Or is the time just filled for them?<\/p>\n
Combine that structure with the “everyone wins” mentality and what do you have?\u00a0 A recipe for mediocrity I think.\u00a0 Life isn’t fair to everyone.\u00a0 Some people win, some people lose.\u00a0 Notice that I didn’t say some people are losers.\u00a0 I don’t believe that.\u00a0 But people that are competitive, curious and self sufficient are generally successful.\u00a0 If our kids don’t learn to fight for what they want, to\u00a0be competitive, to understand the why as well as the how; how will they ever succeed?\u00a0 Shouldn’t we teach them to want to be the best?<\/p>\n
When I was a kid we played pickup games.\u00a0 But we had to figure out who was playing on what team.\u00a0 We had to figure out the rules ourselves.\u00a0 We called our friends to meet after school.\u00a0 We figured out ways to play when we couldn’t\u00a0 find enough players.\u00a0 Today’s kids get carted to the activity.\u00a0 They perform the drills and practice.\u00a0 The coaches ensure that everyone get’s a “fair” amount of play time.\u00a0 In the end, everyone get a small medal or certificate.\u00a0 How does that relate to real life?\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0There’s a lot to think about here.\u00a0 So many layers and so much to consider.\u00a0 What do you think??<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I picked youth soccer because I’m close to it.\u00a0 I have a daughter that we shuttle all…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[100,10],"tags":[19,103,102,20],"class_list":["post-122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ken","category-soccer","tag-article","tag-ken","tag-soccer","tag-writing","wpcat-100-id","wpcat-10-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/holdenroad.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/holdenroad.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/holdenroad.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/holdenroad.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/holdenroad.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=122"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/holdenroad.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3616,"href":"https:\/\/holdenroad.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122\/revisions\/3616"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/holdenroad.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/holdenroad.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/holdenroad.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}