A friend just sent me a video of a reality tv show style YouTube series about youth wrestling and told me to skip to a few parts with parents. I watched an 11 year old kid pin a former state champion and proceed to get yelled at by his dad because "he didn't spend all this time for a 30 second match." Cue to the kid balling and the parent yelling at him more.
I skimmed the rest of the videos and, surprise, surprise, that kid gets emotional in every match. And the dad sits on the mat, yelling at him. And they interview the dad and he's like "I don't know why he's always crying, he's such a Martha." He then explains he nicknames his kid Martha because he thinks he's a pussy.
Like gee, maybe the kid is under an intense amount of stress because he has no idea how to make your dumbass happy.
Youth sports is insane. When I was a kid, my parents basically forced me to go to basketball tournaments off season and I fucking hated it. You felt like you had to go because everyone else was going and then you get sideline coached/yelled at by your parents.
I love how younger generations are always classified by older generations as "lazy" or "wusses" or whatever. You're the ones raising them you fucks.
Maybe stop living through your kid and let them choose what they want to do. I quit basketball after sophomore year and was instantly happier. If your kid likes a sport they're going to end up hating it because of you.
Thank you for listening to my Ted talk.
A major revelation I had in adulthood was realizing there's a lot of parents out there who have no business being parents. Like my dad, for example, a man who will tell you to your face that he's proud of being an asshole.
Whenever I see angry dads speeding around in massive SUVs driving like assholes, I always imagine that they are behaving that way because they hate their wives and kids. And then I think about what if heteronormativity weren't shoved down everyone's throats (although I think that's changing with millennials and zoomers) like maybe this guy would have been happy with no kids. Or maybe no wife. Hell, maybe he'd rather be fucking 21 year old boys.
I always imagine that they are behaving that way because they hate their wives and kids.
It's a major part of it. Like I look at my dad, right, he hates my mom and I. Nobody forced him to remarry and have another kid. But thanks to our reactionary culture and putting an onus on men to be alpha male bread providers and conform to hetronormal behavior I guess he felt he had no choice. But like you said, thankfully things are changing and younger men aren't falling for this anymore.
And just the sheer amount of time kids spend (forced or somewhat willingly) is insane imo.
It's like, when are you supposed to be a kid? Spend all week at school and then all weekend at a tournament.
I also hated baseball lol. I played 1st base. If you chucked a ball at me, I could catch it. I couldn't catch pop flys for shit lmao.
But I went from 3 sports in middle school to 0 and felt much better about everyday life. And not because of the sports, but the parents and coaches and politics.
At my kid's football club I saw a poster the football association in my country has found it necessary to make, containing the following information to parents:
- They're kids
- Football is a game
- It's not Champions League
- The coach is a volunteer
- The referee is a human being
Generally football parents here act normally and allow kids to be kids but there are insane people among them. We've heard a dad being angry at his kid for his teamonly finishing second and back when my GF coached a club with many brown kids parents from other clubs would often yell racist abuse at them.
Funnily enough, your first and third bullets there are why I can only watch college/high school sports and can't stand professional sports.
They're kids. They're going to make mistakes. And that's what makes the games more fun to watch IMO. Doesn't matter if you're the top ranked team in the state, kids won't always play to their potential and can be beaten. Insane parents don't get that.
Real therapy hours, but I had an awful relationship with my father ages like 6-14 because he essentially forced me to try like every sport under the sun and I hated every minute. Probably thought people would think I was gay or something, well oops too late on that one. Needed years of therapy to get past that and he wasn't even like these people.
The irony is, I've always been in pretty good shape. I went to the gym pre pandemic and I run sometimes. I'm just not very competitive and ADHD makes keeping track of a game literally impossible.
Ditto on the non-competitive part.
There's a lot of reasons why I've slipped into an inactive lifestyle and I'm not here to make excuses but I have no doubt part of it is having competition drilled into my head for so long and now that I'm out of shape I have a fear of looking weak/stupid in front of other people. Just like when I was in high school. Feels bad.
I know i'm gonna sound like a dick, but here's a small exercise that got me started because i also had a fairly inactive lifestyle: get a beginners weight set, and watch tv. When commercials start playing, do some basic bicep and hammer curls until the commercials finish. If it starts to hurt, stop. It'll almost become second nature after a few days.
Don't worry you don't come off a dick!
I just moved to a new town last week and I am trying to be more active. I've been walking trails at a state park outside of town and walking to stores. Plus I've been eating much healthier.
Only problem I have is since I teach I won't be paid until August and I'm broke as shit. There is a rec center in town that is very reasonable and works with the school, but they take it out of my paycheck directly so I have to wait a few months to start lifting.
Looks like we're in the same boat. I moved back in with my parents after living in my familys cottage two days ago, but thankfully theres plenty to do. I've still got a lake to do my cardio swimming, and plenty of gardening and maintenance to do. Even got some dogs to go out for runs and to play with. Good luck with getting back into routine, that's always the toughest bit.
I've tried jogging but it's just too damn hot.
I would lie if I said I didn't have anxiety about going to the rec center but I'm hoping to find that routine and actually look/feel better.
I fell in love with lifting because all the guys that were around in the morning at the gym were also in love with it. I've found that if you look like you're trying, you'll get all the positive support you could want.
it's insane. i'm in my 40s now, but from age 4 to 14 i played youth baseball and for about 3-4 years early on, i played youth soccer. i was permitted to quit in high school, because i could articulate that i knew all the kids who were trying out for the team by then, and 95% were hypercompetitive jerks.
youth sports was part of my [single parent] mom's plan to keep me out of trouble by keeping me busy, but also her way to get some time to herself. i walked/biked or was dropped off to all of my practices and games. it was less common than today, but even then, there were parents who were far more emotionally invested in the games than the kids. yelling at refs, screaming at their kids. i remember feeling embarrassed for them and glad my mom wasn't like that.
i remember coaches even back then had way more issues with disruptive parents than any of the kids.
most of my cohort has kids of course, and i swear, so many of them are just plain up their kid's ass 24-7. like, not in a helpful way, but in that over involved/my child is a referendum on my existence/every second of the day is a teachable moment type of shit. like goddam. they're just little humans. stop trying to make their development so much about you and i guarantee they won't hide important shit from you later in life, when the stakes are actually important.
Parents, yes. But I would argue on top of that, US Americans' obsession with youth sports (especially high school sports) is really super weird and bad.
Absolutely. It's the perfect embodiment of America, really. You have to be the best, you can't do anything for enjoyment. Not only that, but you can't just win. You need to absolutely crush your opponents. And even if you do that, you still kick them when they're down.
Kids should just be kids. If they have something they like and are good at, that's great and it's good to encourage them to pursue their interests. It's extremely unhealthy to force them into intense training regimes just because you have some "vision" of your kid being a sports star or something. Same really goes for any hobby but sports do carry a lot of risks to physical health.
And if kids are interested in sports and want to do the AAU stuff, cool. They have a coach. That coach can handle the coaching, you don't need to join in.
Oh yeah, there's a difference between defending your kid and riding their ass nonstop.
If parents wanted their kids to be state champions, they'd probably do better grabbing some binoculars and watching from the window.
I agree 100%. I coached swim team for 4 years and the competitive team I coached was a nightmare, while the mid-tier high school team was great. Sports can be fun and I swam my whole life, so I do like swimming, but not everyone is going to the Olympics or even nationals. That's okay and I wish more parents would accept that. The high school team felt more like an after school club and that's the exact vibe it should be.
Hyper competition is ruining youth activities. And it's parents' fault.
Sports, FFA/4-H, speech, student government, etc.
I'm not even that old but when I was in highschool it felt like I could do things for fun (except sports). But now everything feels like you have to be the best and crush everyone else.
Just sad.
It's getting even younger. Some of my peers are starting to have kids, and they already want them playing instruments, learning to code, taking private tutoring, youth sports, etc. The kids can barely say a complete, coherent sentence. But gotta make sure junior is ready for Harvard in 16 years!
I hate parents who have a preplanned destiny for their kids.
I know someone who is planning their boy to get a scholarship to be a football kicker. So preplanned, the kid's initials are T.E.E.
This brings up some bad memories with me and my parents. Really fun being driven to tears because you dropped a foul ball or only scored one goal in front of the all star coach while you're standing in line for a Whopper. Funny how they took offense when I told them not to attend my games in high school because I played better when they weren't around
That sucks.
It's weird how people don't get why kids are getting more stressed every year.
Hockey dads are nuts. I used to play for a team when i was younger, and while my dad was pretty chill and positive, you'd get the other dads just going nuts. I play casual pickup games with friends and family now and its way more fun.
One time in rollerhockey one of the opposing team's parents came out onto the rink trying to fight one of my team mates. We were like, 12. This was the 90s, too, this shit has been going on forever.
A couple of years ago I saw a single mom screaming at her kids to play harder at a soccer game, like threatening them with no screen time if they didn’t play more aggressively. I’m pretty sure she had the least money out of anyone there and I just assumed that she wanted them to play well so that they could get a scholarship or something but honestly I have no idea. The soccer coach is generally pretty laid back (because the kids were fucking eight years old) and sent out an email to everyone the next day asking parents to chill out at the soccer games. This mother’s kids just like gave up in the middle of the game because all the screaming was clearly demoralizing them but their mom wouldn’t stop.
I enjoyed soccer as a kid but quit as soon as people started taking it seriously. Around that time I switched to running on my own and I’ve been doing that ever since. If I could do a 5k in 18 minutes I think that would be pretty fucking awesome.
I just can't believe a kiddie league coach would do something like that.
Well, you obviously haven't played kiddie league. I'm surprised it wasn't one of the parents.
