Overpraising Kids

I was sitting in the sunshine, enjoying an uncharacteristically warm baseball game at Community Park. One of my sons was playing and I sat away from the crowd in order to enjoy the day and the fact that this was just a game between little boys. Toward the end of the game, a friend wandered near and we began talking. I thought to myself that it had been such a nice, peaceful day. As the game ends and I gather my things, I hear a voice. I have heard this tone before, usually from my husband who knows the answer to the question he is asking me …….and now I get the same feeling and he is nowhere around. The voice says, “Okay, who forgot the snack?” I slowly turn around to find 12 pairs of eyes pointed in my direction, the eyes of the other mothers. Yes. I have forgotten the snack.
Little League. Who knew there would be so much competition? The awkwardness of meeting new people, not knowing if you are good enough, worthy enough, capable of playing the game the right way. And I am not talking about the kids. The competition among the parents is fierce. And now I have committed the horror of horrors…I have forgotten the snack. A baseball game played with no snack reward at the end.
I am a team mom’s worst nightmare. I know this about myself. It is not that I am disorganized or don’t love the kids enough. It is truly the fact that I just don’t care about the snack. Here I am thinking we were out here to play baseball not get all pumped up on caffeine, calories and sugar right before homework and bed. I think it is silly to bribe kids with food to go outside and play.
My own husband knows how much I fail in the team mom area. One year Greg was coaching and asked for volunteers for team mom. When I raised my hand, he had the nerve to look around me and ask if there was ANYONE else who wanted to be team mom. Do you remember when Shrek is asking all the fairy tale characters to lead him back to Farquhar and nobody wanted to help except Donkey. Donkey is jumping all around, eager to help, only to have Shrek look around him for a worthy volunteer. Well, I know the feeling. I get your meaning. I am not team mom material. No hard feelings.
I go on to apologize to the other parents at the game, but that is not the end of it, my transgressions in all areas of the team are paraded out for public view. No matter, I am an adult, I can handle it, I think to myself. As I leave with my son and another boy from the team, they declare that they don’t care about snack anyway and that leaves me wondering why we are doing it at all. Why all the pressure on each other as parents to provide things that the kids won’t miss anyway? Who are we doing all this for? Maybe we are afraid our kid won’t want to play without some reward and they can’t get a scholarship without playing. But, the truth is that all the snacks in the world won’t keep a teenager playing if he doesn’t love the game.
I have been at Little League games where parents are screaming at 12 year old kids, coaches are yelling at umpires, and kids are throwing their mitts in anger. I know kids who have given up the game forever before they even get to middle school. Why? Someone sucked the fun out of the game and it wasn’t another kid, if you get my drift.
I recently read an article on the phenomena of parental peer pressure. It stated that this is a generation raised by parents who feel the pressure to provide everything for their children. We feel pressure from other parents to purchase success for our kids. But, the problem with this thinking is that success is only appreciated when it is earned. I recently helped one of my teen sons clean his room and in the process he threw out at least 40 trophies. He kept two plaques. One was a Young Authors Award and the other was a Best Defensive Player Award from his high school coach. Why these two? Because he EARNED them. Kids know the difference.
Sports, music, camps, traveling teams, personal trainers, we are going overboard in all areas. When I lived in Raleigh there was even a daycare called Little Pros that would develop your little athlete from birth. As parents we are left with the feeling that if you don’t purchase it for you child, you are somehow cheating them in the game of life.
But, is that thinking necessarily true? ABC News recently ran a story on the overpraising of today’s children. Kids are being rewarded for everything they do. My husband always laments about his Texas high school football team winning the championship every year and they never once received a trophy, while our kids have hundreds of trophies just for showing up. The study also showed that one third of all parents believe that their child has professional sports potential. The truth of the matter, only one third of 1% of high school athletes make it to the pros. Better have a back up plan.
So, maybe it is time to back off on all the parental peer pressure we impose on one another. It is actually having the opposite effect. Kids who are over praised have a harder time dealing with failure when they get older. No one is handing out snacks or trophies for showing up at work. Let’s put the fun back in weekends and the fun back in sports. Let the kids play the game for the fun of it. As is stated so eloquently in The Incredibles, “When everyone is special, no one is.”