A few months back I saw a shared FB post with a title along the lines of, “I’ve never missed one of my kid’s sports games”. The author went on to let the world know that parents that miss sporting events are doing a disservice to their children or are even borderline bad parents.
My two youngest children are 12 and 13 and only 13.5 months apart in age. We eat, breathe and live youth sports. We are at practices, training sessions, private lessons, or actual games and competitions six days a week, almost every week. Our middle daughter is in all-star cheerleading, which is a year-round sport, meaning all twelve months. Our son plays football and basketball.
My children’s sports have taken priority over family dinners and other family get-togethers. We have had to make decisions about not going on vacations or dividing our family up during them because of youth sports. As a family, we make sacrifices every day for our children to participate in sports.
As I write this, I am waiting for my son’s basketball game to begin. I left my house at 3 p.m. and I’m attending two games taking place an hour apart; I won’t be home until 8 p.m. Similarly, my husband left shortly after me to watch our daughter compete. He won’t be home until 10 p.m., if he’s lucky! It’s a Sunday. This is our life as sports parents, more often than not.
My husband and I both enjoy seeing our children’s sports events and competitions. We are proud of their hard work, dedication and teamwork. When it comes to how to make your child successful in life, these are all characteristics we want to instill in them. Going to sporting events falls under one of many parental duties that we love! We are beyond proud and happy to watch them participate. Still, I believe there’s a line that needs to be drawn before we become those parents obsessed with children’s sports.
We have and will miss some of our kid’s sporting events. Our kids will survive. We think they will thrive. We don’t want to be the parents who do everything for their child. It will teach them a very valuable lesson. My dad used to say often as my sister and I grew up, “The world does not revolve around you”.
There are special times in all of our lives that we will have all eyes on us, and everyone will come together to celebrate us. But the vast majority of an adult’s life is spent working and grinding without an audience there to cheer them on, which is why I think sometimes missing a practice or game can contribute to how to make your child mentally strong. Still, I will say my children almost always have someone who loves them at their games and competitions. If both of us are out of town we do our best to have grandparents, close friends or our au pair go to cheer them on. There have been times when those people are unable to go, too. I hardly think that’s something our kids will be talking about in therapy later in life.
Somewhere between my upbringing and my children’s upbringing, things got turned around. My parent’s lives never completely revolved around my youth sports schedule or anything else for that matter, besides holidays and big life events. My life revolved around their schedule. There were times when I couldn’t participate in activities or sports simply because they didn’t work with my parents’ schedules. That was the end of it. I never thought they were bad parents or that my parents hate me. I was loved, I was secure, I wasn’t neglected.
Cheer competition season runs from December until May. The schedule for competitions comes out in August. Do you know how hard it is to plan time away with girlfriends that have the same bat-shit-crazy children’s sports schedules as you? Darn near impossible. Sometimes we plan a year in advance. If a competition falls on that weekend, I kindly explain I have plans and since sports rule the Ruth World year-round, I’ll have to sit this one out.
If I let the mom guilt win and chose to not ever miss a sports event, school event, or any of the other countless “events” my kids have, I’d never leave Mechanicsburg. The events parents are inundated with are relentless. “Sure! I’d love to give up the only two hours our family has unscheduled on Wednesday night to visit school for the fourth time before it starts in a week.” (Insert eye roll emoji here.) It wasn’t always this way. There used to be time for free play, family time that didn’t involve sitting in a car on the way to sports and good old downtime.
There are a lot of great reasons why kids should play sports. Sports for kids, no matter what kind, can teach them discipline, work ethic, teamwork, and they keep them busy; “Idle hands make fretful minds.” I wholeheartedly believe participating in sports helps to make them better people, but the idea that missing a single sporting event, or a few events for that matter, would be detrimental to your kids, is overblown. Some parents today need to realize that kids grow up and grow out of the house. They have to function in the real world without their parents’ support in everything they do. I’m a firm believer that if you want to know how to make your child successful in life, create some independence for them. The next time you feel guilty about missing something for your kids, brush that dirt off your shoulder and know that you are contributing to their development and independence later in life.
