The biggest babies at a girls’ flag football tournament in Revere, Massachusetts, weren’t the girls. They were the grown men running the game.
A coach and referee got into a fight in front of children who had come to play football, not watch two adults lose their tempers. Both men later apologized, but what kind of example were they setting?
We hear plenty about how soft kids have become. They can’t handle losing, expect trophies for showing up and need constant praise. But as a psychotherapist, I wonder whether we’ve been blaming the wrong people. Maybe the problem isn’t that children can’t handle disappointment. Maybe it’s that their parents can’t stand watching them experience it.
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Spend a Saturday at a youth sporting event and you’ll see parents screaming at referees and treating a missed call like a personal insult. A father tells his son to stop making excuses after striking out, then berates the umpire.
A mother tells her daughter to be a good sport, then complains that the coach didn’t give her enough playing time. These are often the same people complaining that America is raising a generation of wimps. Yet the moment a referee makes a call they don’t like, they behave like toddlers.
A parent who would punish his child for screaming at a teacher may have no problem screaming at a referee. He sees nothing wrong with it because he believes he’s standing up for his kid. But defending your child doesn’t give you a free pass to behave like a bully.
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For some parents, their child’s athletic success has become tied to their own self-esteem.
When the child wins, they feel successful. When the child loses, they feel embarrassed. A father who never made varsity may see his son’s benching as another personal rejection. The child is playing a game, but the parent is still trying to settle something from 25 years ago.
Your child’s athletic career isn’t a second chance at your own. If you didn’t make varsity in high school, screaming at your son’s Little League coach isn’t going to change that.
Youth sports have become an expensive business.
Families spend thousands on travel teams, private lessons and tournaments. Some start talking about college scholarships before their children are even teenagers. After all that investment, parents can begin to feel they’re owed something. If their child isn’t starting, the coach must be playing favorites. If the team loses, someone must be incompetent. Sometimes your kid just isn’t that good. Sometimes he has a lousy game. Sometimes the other team is better. That’s sports, and arguing with the coach won’t change it.
We’ve gotten so used to treating children’s disappointment as something that needs fixing that ordinary setbacks have become emergencies. Losing isn’t a crisis. Sitting on the bench isn’t trauma. A coach telling your kid he needs to improve isn’t abuse. Yet some parents respond as though their children have suffered a serious injustice.
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A child who gets benched may be upset for an hour or two. He complains on the ride home, and moves on. His father, meanwhile, is still angry three days later, replaying the coach’s decisions. The kid who struck out has forgotten about it. Dad is still furious on Tuesday.
These parents are depriving their children of some of the most useful experiences sports can provide. Kids need to learn that trying hard doesn’t guarantee winning, that someone else may be better and that unfair things sometimes happen. They need to figure out what to do when they’re disappointed rather than expect an adult to intervene.
I’ve seen adults struggle with this same habit. They get passed over for a promotion and assume the boss has something against them. They receive criticism and spend days complaining about how unfairly they’ve been treated. They devote more energy to proving somebody else was wrong than considering what they might do differently.
Of course, parents should intervene when a coach is abusive or a child is genuinely being mistreated. But not making the starting lineup isn’t mistreatment. Neither is losing a game or being told to practice more. There’s a difference between protecting children from harm and protecting them from disappointment.
Which brings us back to Massachusetts. Whatever prompted the disagreement, two adults at a children’s football tournament ended up fighting in front of the players. Had one of the girls behaved that way, she probably would have been removed from the game. Instead, the adults were the ones who needed to be separated.
Those girls showed up to play football. Instead, they watched two grown men make fools of themselves. Maybe the next time we complain that kids today can’t handle disappointment, we should look at the adults standing on the sidelines. If your child’s Little League game can ruin your entire weekend, your child isn’t the one who needs to grow up.
