When I was growing up, you would ride your bike down the street and find kids playing football and baseball in their yard and basketball in their driveway. When was the last time you saw kids doing this? Think about it. Today, the kids are either indoors with computer games (That's what they call playing now.) or at an organized activity. This is a huge change in the way kids play. Now, mom drops junior off at the organized activity and then goes on her shopping trip. I coached my son in youth soccer. I figured that I would donate some of my time, since my son was in the activity. (When he decided he didn't want to play soccer anymore, we let him quit, although not in the middle of a season.) I found that it was so easy for parents to drop their kids off at soccer practice and be on their way, never helping in the activity. Let someone else take care of my kid.
Today, many kids are terribly overscheduled! Mom ferries the child to 3 activities the same day, after a long day at school. We must have the kid in hockey, swimming, martial arts, music lessons, dance lessons, basketball traveling team, pee wee football, etc...etc...etc. This is what I call activity day care. Have these parents ever asked their child what they want?
The result of this is that kids are denied a simple developmental activity...PLAYING. Kids need to interact with their peers and not have adults intrude 24/7. Kids learn to get along better when they play. Nowadays, kids in sports have learned to blame the referees and coaches for misfortune. Intrusive parents have taught kids that winning is the only thing that is important. When surveyed, kids report that the number one thing they want out of sports is fun. Winning is far down the list. However, parents make sure the kids have fancy uniforms with their names on the back and shower them with trophies. Is this appropriate for young kids?
Heck, we never had those problems. We made our own teams, coached ourselves and refereed our own games. If we didn't have 9 guys for a baseball team, we made do with less and adjusted our rules. "No hitting to right field cuz we don't have a right fielder." Everyone was welcome to play. We didn't hand-pick "traveling" teams with the best players. The only traveling we did was to the front yard or to the field behind the school. But we always made it home for dinner or before the sun went down. No one ever went home blaming the ref or ump or coach. We just had fun.
It's time to let kids be kids again.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment