This morning I took my son to his soccer game that we go to everyday Saturday and were very disappointed to see the other teams, very competitive parents, getting mad at their kids if they went the wrong way or didn’t kick the ball hard enough. The game really got out of hand when their coach/parent got in the face of ours, then all hell broke loose. I found myself getting very stressed and angry when one of their kids was purposely chasing down other players to elbow or hip check them to the ground…I couldn’t take it anymore after he made two of our kids cry. I completely lost my temper and told the coach to pay a little more attention to his misguided kids instead of berating them…among some other kind words. That intern caused an uproar on their side and the game that was supposed to be fun for the kids on Saturday morning, turned into a yelling match between parents.

It really makes me concerned when we as parents are taking the fun out of teaching our children the fundamentals of life through sports. My son doesn’t seem that interested in playing the game of soccer and is more about just hanging out with his friends on Saturday morning. This is the part I want my son to enjoy so we’ll stick through to the end of the season to finish what we started. Based on today’s escapades though, we will probably switch to Tae Kwon do in the future to avoid those crazy eyed parents who are living vicariously through their children. We all want our kids to do better than we did, but pushing kids to be competitive at any costs at the age of 4 and 5 is just a little disturbing and its sad to see people teaching their kids how not to have fun, forcing them to grow up too quickly.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 19th, 2008 at 11:54 pm and is filed under philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.