How about every parent who puts academic pressure on their kid? Is that really any different?
In the abusive sense, no, and I think you’ll find my wording can pretty easily accommodate academic pressure from Tiger Moms, Helicopter Parents, etc.
However, at the very least, academic success provides much more numerous “easy” paths to financial security later in life, while the skillsets you develop, say, as a youthful cellist don’t always translate cleanly 1:1 (though things like hard work, ability to practice, etc. are certainly useful).
Athletic success gets many kids into colleges they otherwise couldn’t afford or get into.
Sure but as a lifelong nerd I discount athletics as useless and droll.
Obviously abuse is unacceptable. And it is not a necessary condition for excellence.
Don’t discount the sport, discount the player.
So now we’re not even paying full value for these student athletes? Terrible!
Well, we only get 1-3 years out them instead of the 4 needed to graduate.
See that’s why Mike Jordan was a real athlete and this Lebron guy is just a scrub.
I’ve read a few books about this, actually - Basically, we have parents all over the world trying to pressure their offspring to become the number one in any kind of sport, effectively taking away their chances of any kind of normal childhood. This happens with Tennis, golf, running and so on. In some countries, its their way out (Especially certain African countries, and south American where poverty levels are high), but also a lot in Asia, where parents spend all their money, and all their time from the age of 4-5 years to teach them the chosen specialty of sport, from sunup to sundown, every day.
Depending on level of “hunger” (Again, this is mostly in poor countries) it actually also does work. While people have apititudes, its certainly training that does work.
There are quite a few potential problems though, which is why I use the term ruined. One is of course the lack of ordinary childhood. Now, its only recently that the concept of childhood as we see it in western modern countries has become commonplace, so how damage it does, is of course debatable. Other issues are injuries which happens often, if you are practicing a lot, and can damage the person, quite early.
Then there are social issues, with how most people approach sports, and how child prodigies are taught to approach sports. No spare time, no friends and so on.
There are others (family means vanishing is one often spoken off, to the detriment of siblings, lack of education is another), but I don’t think its the right place to start listing all these things here, since thats not really what the thread is about.
It does not mean what I intended it to mean in that sentence but it is however a correct assessment of how I view sports!
Sports are supposed to be an analogy for war and promote teamwork, perseverance, achievement, a whole host of things. The are also a great way to socialize. Looking back I kinda wish I did more team sports, my sports were all individual (running and fencing). I didn’t play on a team until an intramural league years later and it’s a ton of fun.
But people who take it so super seriously and have their kids practice for years and years and sacrifice their childhoods baffle me. Like, more than baffle me, I kinda pity them and their kids.
It’s great if your kids love the sport and it becomes a defining feature of them and they really enjoy it. But to push and push and push? I don’t see any return there.
Yeah, I’m not advocating for crazy ‘tennis parents’ or people who use their kids to vicariously live out their own dessicated dreams.
While a brutal Darwinian process may indeed promote such ‘techniques’ in the aggregate, it is also true that singular excellence doesn’t need them. John McEnroe didn’t have a ‘tennis dad’, Mozart wasn’t beaten into being a child musician (he pretty much begged his dad to teach him everything), etc.
My position is simple. Where consistent with an avoidance of abuse, a pursuit of excellence in kids is fine. And in some activities, if you don’t start young, you won’t get great. Which means if nobody started young, there would be no great people in those activities anymore. I call that baby/bathwater, although I certainly have stronger feelings about some of those activities (e.g. music) than about others (e.g. gymnastics).
My niece and kids of friends played sport most of their young lives. For my niece it was softball, for a friend it was softball for his daughter and baseball for his son. My niece played at a JC and was offered a few college scholarships far from home and chose to end her career. She still plays in night leagues with friends though. The friends kids pitched and ended up with arm injuries. But both are happy kids and both would probably have played college sports, the daughter was very good and would have ended up with a scholarship.
But those parents and kids spent summers traveling not just California but much of the western US. Pretty crazy.
Yeah. playing on select teams these days means a lot of travelling. I played Khoury League baseball and we played about 10-12 games a year. These select teams will often play 60-70 games a year all over the place. It’s crazy.
We’d be entering some weird parental territory that doesn’t really, well work. Who is to say that an athletic gold medal winner is somehow worse off than the kid who had tons of freedom, got his childhood, and now smokes pot and works a minimum wage job in his 20s with no prospects at all
There are going to be extremes down every path, and not all athletes, probably not even most, athletes are going to be in abuse situations.
I’ll share my own experience as a parent who pushed their kid in the direction of high-end sport competition. Not Olympic-level, but Division-I. @SlainteMhath can maybe see his daughter’s potential future in these tea leaves.
This is super-long. I’m going to collapse some sections so I don’t scare everyone off.
Tin Wisdom Cracks the Whip
I am an abnormally-tall person. I married an abnormally-tall woman. It may or may not surprise you to learn that my two daughters are… abnormally tall.
My philosophy on child-rearing (one which nicely matches my wife’s) is that they should be forced to participate in extracurricular activities with other kids. When my kids were young (6 or so) I forced them to play on the local rec-league soccer teams, and I would step up and help out as an assistant coach or even a full-coach if no one else was available. When they got a little older, I forced them to play volleyball for purely selfish reasons – I really disliked coaching soccer out in the heat, cold, snow, rain and bugs. Plus I don’t really know the soccer rules and they were getting to an age where rules actually mattered.
In general, neither kid wanted to pay either soccer or volleyball. They wanted to say home and “play with their friends”… which really mean “watch TV”. I made them go anyway, tears or no.
When they hit about 12 or so and the competition was a little more fierce, both kids (in different years, obviously) again would complain and I would sit them down and let them know The Deal:
“Here’s the deal,” I would say, “if you don’t want to play volleyball, you don’t have to play volleyball. But you have to do SOMETHING. Soccer, lacrosse, track, swimming, debate, theater, robotics club. SOMETHING. Anything. Your choice. But I’ve already paid money for this season, so you’re going to play volleyball. Next season is up to you.”
Unsurprisingly, neither daughter (at 12) had the wherewithal to arrange for her own destiny, even when I prodded them about it every couple months. So the next season I’d sign them up for volleyball and they’d complain and I would again lay out The Deal.
Somewhere in there though, they both really began to love volleyball. They stopped asking not to play and instead started asking when the season was scheduled to begin. They started getting picked for the advanced teams and they started looking at playing for the high school team.
High End Sports are a Full-TIme Job
Now in our urban/suburban area, the high schools are HUGE. Ours has about 2700 students, which means each grade has about 700 kids. What this means is that competition for the varsity teams is really fierce. If you’re not committed to playing a sport year-round (football excepted), then there is no way you’re even making the JV team.
Both my daughters wanted to play at that level, so they both went into “club” teams at age 14 or 15. In this context, “club” means that you are paying for an experienced coach and probably traveling overnight a few times. And it might mean that every non-school second is spent training.
My eldest was (is) really good and very tall. She tried out for one of the larger clubs and was immediately tapped for one of the higher-level club teams. She played on the high school varsity team as a Freshman. My wife and I started paying stupid amounts of money for the high-level club teams that compete on a national level. As a Junior, she flew to Omaha, Denver, Atlanta and four other cities that I forget to play in huge tournaments against other, similarly-talented kids in front of college scouts.
She would have volleyball practice for two or three hours pretty much every weeknight 10 month out of the year. Weekends were mostly spent at multi-day tournaments. She had lots of non-volleyball friends, but very little social life outside of the sport.
Homework would be a problem sometime, especially if practice was at a middle-of-the-evening time when she’d have to figure out whether to do the work before or after the grueling session.
Despite getting lots of offers from D3 schools (no scholarships allowed) and some scholarship offers from a couple D2 schools that she really didn’t want to attend, she never got a scholarship… which was disappointing given the tens of thousands of dollars that we spent on all the clubs and the travel.
However, she was recruited to play D1 ball for the University of North Carolina (Wilmington), which has a really excellent team. However, she was recruited only after she had already been accepted through the normal admissions process. Playing D1 ball meant that she was practicing 20 hours a week in the off-season and 40 hours a week during the regular season. She did that for two years and then decided to concentrate on her studies and internships. She still plays for UNCW’s club team.
Robbing Kids of their Childhood
So did I break my kid? No. She’s awesome and is doing well by almost any rubric.
Did I rob her of a regular childhood? Tougher question.
Sports in general and team sports in particular tend to raise kids’ grades, at least in moderation. In our high school, the volleyball team has a GPA average that is 0.75 higher than the student body’s average.
We found that the challenge of getting her homework done while juggling practice times made our daughter more organized and more likely to turn in her work on time compared to her (admittedly flaky) non-volleyball friends.
My daughter basically never had much of an opportunity to get into trouble. She couldn’t wander the malls with her friends and two-thirds of her weekends were spent at tournaments. The teams would occasionally test for drugs (more in college than high school), and most had a zero-tolerance policy for underage drinking.
But she’s an impressive young-adult. Flying across the country made her worldly. Playing in college made her a local semi-celebrity and put her in the top social tier. Playing on all those teams made her a leader and she’s flying to national organizations’ meeting and briefing them on coral bleaching… as a undergraduate. I could brag for pages about her.
Would she have gained these traits without her volleyball experience? I don’t think so, myself.
There was a physical toll though, I’m sure of it. It hasn’t shown itself yet and it won’t be as visible as soccer/football related concussions or gymnastics bone compression, but she’ll probably have bad knees or ankles in her 30s or 40s due to all the jumping and diving that she’s done (and is still doing).
This kind of tapers off I think, but my conclusion is this: I believe that the good that is instilled into kids due to high-end competition outweighs the negatives. Can you go overboard? Sure – “I, Tonya” is playing right now if you want to see an example. But you can go overboard in anything… even in not going overboard.
I see Roman Polanski’s #1 fan Harrison Ford is still on there.