My 6 year old is whining about me forcing sports on her (children, safety)

[malamute]

I knew my kid wasn't cut out for team sports because he insisted on playing baseball when he was in 3rd grade. He loved going to all the practices, he loved the games. He was just an embarassment though because he'd be out there in the outfield chatting with a team mate and the ball would land between them. The worst was he would cheer for the opposing team and I had to ask him why he was doing that, they were the enemies and he was supposed to want them to lose and he would answer that one of his friends was on that other team and he wanted his friend to win.

[DAPerro]

Not knowing you, I would hesitate to state if you are pushy or not about sports, but I do have two questions. Is your daughter an only child? Is she very sedentary, or just not interested in organized sports? I am the parent of an only child who is not sports minded at all, but when he was six years old, I registered him for karate classes. Although he was not overly enthusiastic, he grew to enjoy the training, and my husband and I also trained with him. We found that the skills from his martial arts training transferred to other sports because he has developed excellent coordination, flexibility and balance. We were lucky when we started down the road of karate training, because we didn’t know anything about martial arts, and today there are many karate schools that don’t measure up. In the area of distinguishing a good school from a not-so-good school, I would avoid schools that promise a black belt in 2-3 years, ones that offer multiple styles of martial arts all at one school, and schools that focus on wearing pads and head gear while sparring (the pads don’t protect well enough, so that means students get hurt, and it also means that there is not enough emphasis on precision and control).

[skilldeadly]

Originally Posted by midlifeman

I have a 6 year old going on 7. I have signed her up for a sport every season except summer time. She tells me she hates sports because there boring. She say she feels like I am forcing her to play sports. She is only in a rec league (not travel) for soccer. I mentioned basketball to her and she about flipped out on me, yet she plays it in the driveway with me all the time.

I explained to her that playing sports and trying new things is important. It is good exercise, builds self esteem, and encourages you to work in a team atmosphere.

As a parent I believe in pushing your kids to try new things. I feel that sometimes a kid does not know what they really want so I try to put them in new situations or to keep trying something so that they can become better at. They don't necessarily have to be the best, but need to understand that if you stick with something you can achieve greater results.

Am I being too pushy here?

Are you being pushy? Yes. It's possible that she may want to play sports, but you are pushing her away from it by forcing it upon her. I get what you are trying to do. Open her up to new things. Have her try different sports and be active.

You have to find what excites her. Ask her. "So you think sports are boring. What things do you really like?" Maybe debate club. Maybe chess. Maybe just jogging. Not everyone loves playing sports. But you forcing it upon her is going to give her bad memories and you can be certain she will NEVER want to play sports again.

There is a difference between a child that sometimes doesn't want to put in the effort. My GF used to play travel soccer and was very busy as a kid. But her parents knew she loved Dance and Soccer and these moments are just fleeting. If your daughter loathes going and hates you being pushy about it, just back off a bit. But don't allow TV watching and such to be their hobby.

[Kibbiekat]

Also, think of the coach. My husband coaches soccer, and understandably has a hard time with the kids who don't want to be there. It takes time away from the kids who want to play, and contributes to them losing games because some kids just don't care.

[nana053]

Originally Posted by malamute

I knew my kid wasn't cut out for team sports because he insisted on playing baseball when he was in 3rd grade. He loved going to all the practices, he loved the games. He was just an embarassment though because he'd be out there in the outfield chatting with a team mate and the ball would land between them. The worst was he would cheer for the opposing team and I had to ask him why he was doing that, they were the enemies and he was supposed to want them to lose and he would answer that one of his friends was on that other team and he wanted his friend to win.

Actually, I think it is a good thing to cheer the other team as well as your own team. The very best soccer coach my ds had was a Brit whose voice would ring out over the field with "Good play, lads" for either team when they did something well.

[Ringo1]

Originally Posted by mic111

I've only read part of this thread but it is like reading about my idiot father. I had to do a sport every season, every year. I had no interest in sports. It was all about HIM and what HE wanted. I played soccer, ran track, played volleyball, basketball, was a competitive bicycle racer, horse back riding at camp along with every other conceivable activity that any of you can think up. I also took dance (was so horrible they let me quit), gymnastics (have never completed a successful cart wheel and never will), swimming lessons (never did learn as a kid because the YMCA throw the kid off the high board with water wings on technique wasn't really that effective) and music lessons (tone deaf so that was a no-go).

The biggest thing I learned from it was that my opinion didn't matter at all. I also learned ways to cheat during our crazy coaches closed door practices (they were later sanctioned and thrown out).

Most of my coaches were bat **** crazy. Hyper competitive beyond what a kids team should be. When I got older and volunteered to coach a kids basketball team the girls didn't like my being fair because they had never had a coach who wasn't wacko. When we won all the games anyways they baked me cookies and made cards. I stayed after practice to individually teach some little girls to throw and catch. I also gave them just as much playing time as the little girls who were the youngest of 9 kids and had a very high level of skills. The parents loved me. Sometimes the little girls who were less skilled would try to not play so the really talented ones could play 100% of the time. I didn't let them. For heaven's sake it was 8th grade basketball!

One time during my high school basketball game the other team's parents came out of the stands and attacked our team because of all our dirty tricks. Our parents had to come down out of the stands to protect us.

We had hyper competitive girls on our high school team threatening to beat people up in the locker room if they bested them during practice. I was challenged a few times but being really tall and pretty sturdy no one actually attacked me.

I had flat out refused to sign up for basketball camp one year so my dad signed me up and forged my signature. He tricked me into getting into the car the first day and then dropped me off. I had gone several years in the past and hated every minute of it.

I had to tell a referee to disqualify me from a race that I had said I didn't want to attend (end of season and I was so sick of it!). Training started in Jan. and the racing season was May-Sept. By Sept. one year I had absolutely had it and said so, I did NOT want to go to this one last race. I has already won the state championships that year and was done! I trained to peak for that race and was exhausted. Luckily the head ref. was a personal friend so I told him I put the wrong gears on my bike and to disqualify me and he did. You should have seen my dad's face when I didn't go by in the lead pack he came running back to the starting line to see what happened and I told him!

All this torture done under the reason that I was too sedentary! He actually yelled at me for reading books and not science magazines like Popular Science.

He attended every single game and wanted to dissect every single play after every single game. I never wanted to hear about what I did wrong or right or anything at all about it. I never wanted to go in the first place. Unfortunately I was good enough to do varsity and sometimes to start and sometimes to get medals at state meets so this just egged the idiot on. I'm living proof that if you train the heck out of someone they can develop into a decent athlete. But really, should you?

Your daughter is smarter than me and she is telling you early on that you are a complete IDIOT! I wish I had. I waited until I was 16 to put a stop to the insanity. I still had athletic scholarships offered to college because I was on other people's recruiting tapes. But I didn't need them. I was smart enough to get an academic one. Still had to fend off the offers to be on college teams after I got to my ivy league school. But at that time no one could make me play! Ha!!! Unfortunately I did want to play some intramural but they didn't like me since I was too good and would spike the ball too hard or serve it and damage people so they asked me not to play. The boy's basketball coach watched me shoot one time and said he wished his guys could shoot like that. I took my ball and went home. No one was roping me into some idiot sports team again.

As an adult I do alot of things. I wish I had been exposed to paleontology as a kid. In fact I would have preferred to have been exposed to all the sciences instead of all the sport. The coaches all liked me because I could see the patterns and be in the right place at the right time so often made critical plays (again raved about by my dad after the game as an encouragement to me but really, did I care at all about winning some stupid high school game? I did not and knew it didn't matter one iota in the world and never would). But I'd rather have been seeing the pattern in quantum physics (my graduate school major) or other interesting things. What about economics, architecture, engineering, art, world history or really anything but sports?

Oh, my dad also liked computers so I could program. I wrote games that he sold, corrected his graduate students (he was a college professor) programs that were on punch cards, could program in assembly language (blew the professors away at West Point when I wrote code straight out of my head) and would have bets with my older colleagues at Bell Labs when I could write code that worked the first time. In college I met some of my best friends who noticed I could go into the computer lab, type in my program, run it, print it and leave. I also had people wake me up at night to fix their programs the day before a program was due. I had to post a note on my door that I wouldn't help anyone after 11 p.m. because I could read and correct it while half asleep.

I've done alot of things later in life, finally learned to swim as part of training for a triathlon (my idea, not my dad's) but I still hate the thought of all those sports I had to play. Kids sports and high school sports are stupid. I believe in keeping score. I believe in teaching skills. I don't believe in giving trophies to everyone. I am a competitive person and like to win. But I don't need hyper competitive coaches teaching cheating skills or parents who really care about whether their kid's team wins or loses. I don't believe that 99.9% of people coaching kids sports should be allowed to even attend the games. Same thing for most of the crazy parents who are living vicariously through their kids in the name of "exposing" them to things.

Oh, forgot to mention that I developed overuse injuries in my joints from all my "healthy" activity. Thanks dad! My parents said, we wanted to expose you to new things, you were too sedentary and bookish, not social enough, we wanted you to learn team work, sports develops self esteem etc. All the same things your saying. All to justify my ex college football dad's desire to live vicariously through his kids.

By the way OP, I am your daughter writing to you from the future. If I'm still talking to you.

Wow. Powerful stuff straight from the horses mouth.

One of the women I work with ran track for a large D1 school. She is married now, with children, and rarely sees her father. She says he can STILL only relate to her as one of her coaches.

Lessons to be learned.

My son is currently swimming in college. He is SO burned out that I doubt he swims more than one year.

He really didn't focus ONLY on swimming until middle school. And he's still burned out. As a year round swimmer, we spent approx two week-ends a month out of town at some 3 day swim meet. Your child has to really LOVE a sport to participate on that level.

I will say there is incredible pressure on parent's today to get their child INVOLVED in competitive sports and NOW. Some children start at 4.

Being forced to participate in a sport that she hates or isn't that good at - won't do ONE THING for her self-esteem other than kill it. Along any any desire to play any sport - ever.

[CraigCreek]

Originally Posted by Kaleetan

In your opinion.

And in my experience.

[psichick]

Having your daughter do something is fine. But if she's bored of "sports" why not find something else this year? Art classes? Dance? Girl Scouts? Individual sports is good too. Martial arts? Golf? Tennis? The ONLY way she's going to find out what her passion is....is when DAD learns to expand HIS horizons and stops forcing organized sports on her. You want her to find her passion, but you're limiting her exposure. Some kids don't like organized sports and it could even be specific sports.

My brother is Mr. Sports. He excels at everything. He wanted to play basketball one year, in addition to baseball and soccer. He hated it. HATED IT! But obviously, he still loved organized sports as he continued playing soccer and baseball. He still enjoyed basketball, but only at home, "shooting hoops". Me, I loved playing softball and didn't really want to try anything else. Mostly because I was good at it and I knew it. So it made it that more enjoyable. Sucking at something, especially team sports, can be hard. Even if the team is supportive, you feel like you're constantly letting them down.

Lastly. I will say this. During the summer, my mom put my brother and I into tons of other things. Some things we got to choose, others not so much. We took ice skating lessons. We were forced to take a summer class, but got to choose the class. I took a class about reptiles, he took a class about rockets. My mom even signed us up at the local community college in an art class....with college students. I took a tumbling class. We'd go to the library. We took swimming, diving, even learned to shoot pool (billiards). I tried tennis one year (boy did I suck, but had fun). In the end, because we got to choose things we were interested in and also put into things we wouldn't have thought about (like ice skating or college art classes), we both got a chance to find our passion. My brother may have excelled at everything, but he only really loved soccer and water sports. I loved softball, diving, and music.

But because our passion for trying things wasn't squashed, we still learn. I picked up golf as an adult. I also took piano lessons, taught myself languages, going to learn how to play the ukulele. Picked up knitting and crocheting (again). Started running, took aikido.

Don't squash your daughter's love for the game. If she loves shooting hoops with you, and doesn't want to play basketball on a team, don't. Just keep shooting hoops with her. That time with her, you should treasure. And hopefully, as you get older, she'll continue to do it, for fun or to just spend time with her father. Help her find her passion by looking beyond organized sports.


And for this person:

Originally Posted by PhotoProIP

If she is a she what a heck is she doing in football? art, ballet, fashion, design, music, piano etc...things that girls like to do...football is for those who like to get hurt a lot! I would NEVER put my child in any kind of sport with the ball! They're stupid and invite to injuries! No Thanks. She is a GIRL! Yes you are way to pushy and with something that is a horrible choice for a GIRL! JMO. Of course.

Talk about sexist. I'm a woman and find this so demeaning. I played ball sports, grew up getting hurt, and getting hit. I take it, ice it, and keep playing. I love musical instruments, crocheting, knitting, and other "girly" things. Oh, my mom taught both me and my brother everything. So yeah, he learned how to crochet, sew, iron, etc. Mom also taught us how to ride a skateboard. Dad built us stilts to walk on. Mom taught us hopscotch and jump rope. We got unicycles once for Christmas. Girls should be able to do whatever they want. Regardless of their sex. You're only holding them back if you don't allow them to try things.....all things....not just what you think is gender specific things. Ditto goes for boys. Jeez. This is 2013.

[midlifeman]

Great feed back gang. I'm leaning toward the Michelle Obama approach. I.E. you can pick something you like and we will pick something new that you haven't considered before. This simply means I am keeping her engaged in the process of Discovery. She is just too young to narrow her focus and let's face it kids don't know exactly what they want yet and they don't know what they are capable of. My point is don't give up on your kids. Don't assume that they are going to flourish, guide them and yes push them! Why? Because no one else will.

[ddandkat]

Originally Posted by rezfreak

I dont understand the need or desire to push it on them. If she wants to do it, she'll tell you.

i agree with rezfreak