My five year-old son belongs to a soccer league. This is his first time attempting organized sports, and he played in his first competitive game yesterday evening.
During the game, my son got hold of the ball in the open field and took off with it toward the other team's goal. I began to cheer for him, but that quickly got shot down by the other parents because, apparently, you are not supposed to cheer for your own child - you are only supposed to cheer for the entire team: "Go Firecrackers!"
Later during the game, my son was sitting out for a few minutes, so we kicked the ball around near the sidelines. Since I wasn't paying attention to the game during that time, once my son went back in to the game, I asked my wife what the score was. That's when I found out that they don't keep score during the game, because after all, they only want the kids to have fun. Funny, I thought competition is what makes things fun.
Look, I realize that these kids are only five years old. There isn't a stadium full of people yelling for them. The score of their game is not going to go down in the annals of sports history. I ask though, what is the harm in cheering for your own child at the expense of the other kids? Somehow, I think the other kids will get over it. What is the harm in keeping score? Are these kids' fragile little souls going to be devastated if they lose? And if their souls do shatter, shouldn't they learn from day one how to handle it when losing inevitably happens?
One of the worst things that ever happened to our educational system and our society was when worries about the self-esteem of our children reached obsessive levels. It became accepted orthodoxy that exposing our kids to failure would scar them for life. Instead, it sets them up for further failure by making them afraid to try. What I witnessed at the soccer game last night is a perfect example of the legacy of this self-esteem movement that began in earnest back in the 1970s and 1980s. While some of its excesses have begun to be addressed, the vestiges of this movement are obviously still with us.
Perhaps, the coaches and timid parents believe that winning and losing and scores don't matter to kids so young. Hmmm. Sure enough, after his first soccer match, on the way home, my son asked my wife and me, "So, who won the game?"
Good Day to You, Sir
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free... it expects what never was, and never will be." --Thomas Jefferson
3 comments:
Oh God, this makes me ill.
Thankfully, this kind of non-competitive ideology is preparing kids for......well......actually it's preparing kids for nothing. They don't learn about hard work, competition, working as a team, winning gracefully, losing gracefully, sportsmanship.....
What they learn about is something that doesn't exist, and they are ill prepared for the real world.
Yeah, um, I think I'll be cheering for my child, and anyone who doesn't like that can plug their ears.
Wow. Unbelievable.
I just put up a new sign in my classroom. It says something like, "Forget about self-esteem, and invest a little more in self-control."
The people who came up with this self-esteem movement, non-competitive sports, etc need mean and horrible things done to them.
Ah yes, the self-esteem movement, I remember it well. While teaching grades 4-6, from 1972-2005, I watched my students suffer through the era. The "Whole Language" programs, "self esteem movements", and "almost" math programs flourished in the late 80s and early 90s. The split in philosophy between the male members of the staff and the younger female members was tremendous. The male members felt the slogan for the self-esteem movement should have been, "I don't know anything, and I feel good about it".
Those students are now adults, and they are now paying the price of education's mistakes. In the real world self-esteem, without skills, doesn't pay much.
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