Let Them Be Kids by Jessica Smartt

Author:Jessica Smartt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2020-04-28T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

THE GIFT OF BALANCE

Sports and Extracurriculars Are Awesome (Except When They’re Not)

When my oldest son was five, we signed him up to play soccer at the YMCA. It seemed like the thing you do. I have minimal recollection from this soccer season. Just a few things stand out:

•There were about as many goals scored accidentally as there were on purpose.

•Our son had a terrible attitude one time and refused to shake hands afterward. My former-navy-captain father-in-law yanked him by the earlobe to the handshaking line with as much ferocity as I have seen him display in twenty years.

•One of my nephews was relentlessly aggressive . . . just not regarding the actual play of soccer. That is, he perpetually had a vicious eagle eye toward the bleachers, on his little brother, whom he suspected to be eating his fruit snacks and drinking his juice boxes. He would race over to the sidelines (mid-play, mind you) and yell, “Stop eating my chewy snacks!” He was the most aggressive player out there, for sure.

Few things are more demonstrative of a parent’s unrequited love than a YMCA field on a Saturday morning in mid-June. It stuns me. This is the busiest, most run-ragged and overworked segment of society, with any one of nine hundred things they could be doing instead. These are the moms who have nursed babies every three hours all night long and who haven’t had a leisurely Saturday morning in a decade. And yet they come. Lugging sunscreen and thermoses of coffee and sippy cups and all the lawn chairs and blankets and sun umbrellas and enough snacks for a car ride to Mexico. They’ll heartily yell phrases like “Way to be ready!” and “Nice try, buddy!” in the most extreme of conditions—from sleet, to drizzle, to sun so terrible that the sweat drips in steady streams down sticky t-shirts.

By the way, I’ve focused on ball sports, but I could be talking about any number of popular kids’ activities. I have a friend whose girls are standouts in gymnastics and dance, and her weeks are brim-full with competitions and rehearsals. Maybe for your family it’s swim, violin, singing competitions, karting, figure skating, or theatre.

And for what? What pulls parents to partake willingly in this spectacle, in the face of sundry other more appealing Saturday morning options? Of course, I can’t speak to the motivation of every single parent who lugs an often-unenthusiastic Little Leaguer to the ball field in ninety-degree heat, but a few common themes draw us to committing (sometimes overcommitting) to organized activities for our kids:

1.It feels good when our kids are involved in stuff, and it feels even better when they are good at stuff.

2.As parents, we have fixated on a few particular arenas that we think mean something. We have universally agreed, for example, that it means something to win a swim meet or a dance competition, to be starting pitcher, play travel soccer, or excel at piano.

3.We will willingly help our kids reach these goals in spite of tremendous personal sacrifices to our finances, comfort, or schedules.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.