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.
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.