When Adults Take Over Children’s Fun

“I just realized that one of the things I love about this blog is that we don’t use “DD” and “DS” and “DH” and all that chat-forum type lingo.”

So much this! I hate that stuff; I don’t hang around chat rooms very much so I was stymied for a moment by DS12. Does that mean ‘my darling son who is 12 years old’?

And what if on a particular day your son, daughter, or husband is not exactly “darling” to you? Do you still have to post that way? LOL ROFL etc.

My kids are just starting soccer and t-ball this year. Different kids, different organizations. I get the same mixed messages from both organizations:

1. At this age (4-6) the point of the sport is for the kids to learn and have fun.

2. Kids who stay in the organization as they get older are more likely to achieve national excellence and get a post-secondary education on the back of an athletic scholarship.

Unfortunately, this depends on the individual child. My youngest is a really quick study, creative, talented. BUT. Whatever she does has to be her own idea.

She does pretty well on the piano for her age, but she practices very little, because she’s “supposed to.” If she would do it for fun, she’d be able to really enjoy the art much more than she does. I taught myself as a kid and I loved it! Then, a few years into playing, I hired a piano teacher, and suddenly I didn’t want to practice any more. I fired the piano teacher and then I was motivated again. Logical, right? So why don’t I have the guts to leave piano up to this kid?

And then my other kid is the opposite. She comes and asks me for a list of assignments and chores. She likes me to guide her. It’s sort of our love language. She also likes to be competitive (with sports in particular), and she’d love to be in serious gymnastics / swim team (but her sister wouldn’t, so we stick to recreational). I’ll bet that if she had a piano teacher who put her in a competition re chords and scales etc, she’d practice 10x as much. 😉

The piano stuff resonates with me from a very different experience.

Growing up, the piano was Mom’s evening therapy after putting the 4 of us to bed. Twelve years of lessons as a kid had served her well, Mozart sonatas were her favorite.

Fast forward to my late teens and 20s, and the most common question I got after playing publicly was from parents, “How many years of lessons did you take?”

The answer? Two

Mom and I tried on teacher/pupil roles at the keyboard when I was 7-8. I don’t even remember why it didn’t work for us, just that it didn’t at all. But we didn’t sweat it. I still messed around, trying to learn some of the Mary Poppins songbook and gradually picking up some of my pop favorites and then latching onto chord structures. The chords were the aha! piece — I wasn’t a good sight-reader, but with the chords I could fill in the blanks, making sense of the overall structure of the music.

The two years of lessons, at age 12-13, were with a college music prof who helped me bore into (instead of get bored by) some basic music theory. I paid for my own lessons (paper route earnings), practiced a lot, played my/Mom’s favorite Mozart sonata for a recital. And then stopped when I didn’t have enough time or energy to get my money’s worth out of the lessons.

And I kept playing. Learned dozens of songs, improvised on church hymns, wailing away or working out gentle background-ish stuff, all with one limitation: Never in public. I’d had few lessons after all, wasn’t a great sheet music reader.

In my senior year of high school, the choir director heard a rumor that I played, which I quickly walked back. “I don’t play the piano, I just play around. Nothing serious.” When she refused to take no for an answer, I sat down and showed her what a quirky mess my playing was.

Before long, I was accompanying the full choir with a spirited, much-improvised background for Oh, Happy Day! which crescendoed to raucous climax. I was accompanying a half-dozen of my classmates for their talent show performances, and I was having a blast.

The inevitable follow-up question about years of lessons, “How can I get my kid (more) interested in playing?” had an easy answer: Make sure they’re playing stuff they like, let them play with it, and don’t sweat it if piano turns out not to be their thing.

The YMCA offers youth programs that are NO PRESSURE and they go a lot older than preschool (they don’t keep score, focus on sportsmanship, equal playing time, etc. It’s a perfect place for kids/parents who just want exercise and exposure to different sports.

FWIW, talking your kid out of their interest (in the example, dance lessons) doesn’t seem like it aligns with free range thinking.

My daughter used to practice (last school year) karate in day care. The kids would line up, try to remember the steps, and cheer each other on. I don’t know if they do it today my daughter is now in middle school.

Most of the kids continue karate but talk about the good old days when they were qualified to practice on their own. My daughter was usually the decision maker because she was 1-2 years old than anyone else but she was careful not to be only voice.

I dropped my sixth grader off for volunteer work and some of the fifth parents were jealous of me leaving. Why because they had to stay at spring fling I could leave just because my daughter was volunteering. I did and did not come back for several glorious hours. That was my real mother’s day gift.

@LauraL…I understand what you’re saying, but if your kid has an interest and you’ve entertained the idea of finding a class/league/whatever for them, it doesn’t seem fair to “talk them out of it”. If it’s budgetary, then you should prepare/review all that before you even offer the kid the options.

As far as commitment, I don’t happen to agree that kids should be held to a lengthy commitment for something they haven’t even tried yet. In travel soccer, you try out months in advance of when the team actually starts training/playing. If the coaching or team situation isn’t a good experience/environment for my kid to be in, I’m not going to make him play for another 6 months. I’ve had 2 kids play travel soccer for over 10 years combined. Only once did we have a child leave a team before the year concluded. It was a situation where the coach lied to our kid about how he could/would earn playing time (about 3 months into a 10 month season). There was no justifiable reason to keep our very unhappy kid in that situation. A few weeks after we let him leave the team, a parent called to say that the club had fired the coach and wanted to understand better what had transpired. He was encouraged to return to the team (he declined).

I most definitely wouldn’t allow a child to quit without discussion and reflection, and I’d have an opinion about how and when (I’ve witnessed a HS kid quit a team on the field immediately following a game which his parents endorsed!) but I don’t think kids should be locked into bad situations.

I can leave a job where I don’t find the situation beneficial to me. I’m going to afford my kids the same options…after working thru the situation as best we can.

E –

There is a big difference between letting your kid quit something because the situation is bad and allowing your child to quit things willy nilly.

If I sign my child up for an activity it is always with the understanding that she will participate until the end. We discuss the requirements and expectations at length before we ever sign up. If the situation itself goes south, I will certainly consider allowing her to quit. If she wants to quit because she wants to do something else or it is taking too much time, etc., I tell her that she has to honor her commitment.

For example, my daughter wanted to sign up for swim team this summer. It requires going to practice every day for an hour and a half. A big commitment. We talked about this repeatedly and she assured me that she really wanted to do it. If she comes to me half way through the summer and wants out because it is taking too much time or something similar (I somewhat anticipate this happening), I’ll tell her too bad; she made a commitment and took a spot that would otherwise have gone to one of the many kids on the waiting list and she needs to finish out the summer (and not ask to do it again). However, if she came to me with legitimate complaints about the team itself, I’d listen to her and likely allow her to quit if we can’t work it out.

@ lollipoplover

I think the ‘hopelessly behind’ comment reflects not the kid, but the organized sports available in the writer’s area.

This is totally true in my town. There is literally no way to play baseball unless you started before 3rd grade. By age 10, all the teams involve tryouts. If you’re just learning, it is well nigh impossible to make the team. There are no leagues available in my town that are ‘no cut’ for baseball. So it means that you have to devote every spring to it starting in first or second grade or you’re sunk. Which is why my kids don’t play baseball, despite occasionally expressing a desire to. They weren’t into it young, and now it’s too late and they don’t have the skills to get on the team. Hockey and some other sports around here are the same. The YMCA has no-cut teams, but they end in 1st or 2nd grade. My kids were able to go out for track and field this year in middle school, but there are really very few options around here for casual sports. Kinda sucks.

I think I noticed the ‘fun’ vs. ‘work’ problem when I transferred from Montessori to public school. Kindergarten through 3rd grade I had never heard anyone say they “didn’t like reading.” With out a doubt some kids had a greater love of reading than others, but everyone read. Of course we all had to get through the process of learning to read, and certain words or books were hard, but it was never a problem with reading. We just worked at our pace and got lots of help from our friends and teachers whenever we asked for it. By 1st grade when we could all read fairly well. We occasionally talked about nouns, verbs, etc. But mostly we just read, went to the library, and traded books a lot. I think it was 2nd or 3rd grade when a friend smuggled me a copy of “The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe” (my father objected to the author for proselytizing.) But I didn’t want to be the only kid in the class who wasn’t part of the conversation. Then there was my favorite Roald Dahl you had to know enough of his work to argue the merits of “Matilda” vs “Charlie & the Chocolate Factory” vs “James and the Giant Peach” vs “the BFD.” And if someone read a new one and made it sound cool… well you had to be fast to get it the next library day. The debates often erupted in the middle of other work (which then stopped) but that didn’t bother the teachers. The teachers never entered or stopped the great debates.

Then I got to public school (honors program no less) and suddenly everyone seemed to loudly declare that they “didn’t like reading.” No one talked about favorite books or favorite authors. One of the books my sister positively hated in 4th grade, I noticed was sort of good. But class did suck the life out of it. I couldn’t talk about what I thought was exciting with my classmates (no interrupting quiet reading time and no one wanted to talk at recess), and during the class discussions of course only one person could talk at a time and only to the teacher. If you said something the teacher would try to either make a big lesson out of what you said, or would tell you you were wrong. Either way stunk, if the teacher beat the point to death your class mates would sit there silently rolling their eyes and hating it (rather than being able to say… yeah, but x was more fun). And the teacher saying you were wrong was somehow more crushing than a table full of kids clamoring that no-no-no… you had it all wrong. Perhaps because you either convinced them or they convinced you, but you had a fighting chance either way. But with the teacher even if the teacher couldn’t persuade you; you were just wrong and the conversation was over.

Rec Centers tend to have classes and lessons that are far less structured and are less competitive than league counterparts. I would check there and soon.

@Bob, yup – totally agree. My children both had the same, wonderful 1st grade teacher. When my younger child had her, the school had rec’d a population of vision-impaired kids. She was going to have them in her class for part of each day. She embraced the idea because she said that even sighted children learn differently. Some respond to visual instruction, some verbal, etc. She felt like it would force her to teach in ways that would benefit many of her class, not just the vision impaired. It’s really never one size fits all.

After reading this thread today, I ran some errands before dinner. I noticed a little sign planted at an intersection for a sports program geared toward older kids, but not school based. I really think there are a lot of options out there for most kids. I think programs have cropped up to serve the home school kids as well. I know a neighbor kid has a “sportsmanship” sign in his yard from a league that is serving them.

For the mom whose son started out loving writing until it became homework… What really worked for me as a child was getting a diary for my 5th birthday. My parents never “forced” me to write in it. But I discovered that if my parents came in at night for “lights out” and I was writing in my diary, they would let me finish writing first. So I could delay going to sleep just by writing in my diary every night. And so I did. I have 10+ years of diary entries written every single day, detailing what I was thinking and doing that day. Volumes and volumes of diaries that are fun to go back and look at now to remember what my child self felt was important enough to document. But that’s how I developed my writing skills. And that morphed naturally into writing both fiction and nonfiction, for which I have since been published in both.

I think if parents want to encourage a child, they can allow the child to experience natural benefits to their activities. Not artificial bribes, but natural consequences. I developed a lifelong love of writing simply because it let me stay up just a little bit later.

I think there’s a middle ground, too, and this is coming from the perspective of a family in which music is as much a required part of school as math. It *is* fun, and we won’t *expect* our children to be competitive. We do and will expect good, applied, effort. We won’t insist they follow both my husband and me to Csehy Summer School of Music as teens, but will plan financially so they can. “Just for fun” is okay, yes, but somewhere between something you can stop any old time and something that becomes life-consuming, is there.
Oh- the best musician I knew among my age growing up? He’s a neurosurgeon at Hershey Medical Center now, at 32.

Seems more along the lines of everything else we’ve had here lately about the “get them in early, train them for college scholarships!” attitude. I’ve seen this in the Chinese School my kids attend, the parents there latch onto, and discuss, what sport of extra-curricular will get their kids placement. Fencing, for some reason, has dominated the past two years. My oldest son was interested to watch, but didn’t like the uniform, he just liked the idea of playing with the swords. He has had interests in sports, and could be good if he practiced more, but after a couple of years of trying to play and practice I gave up. It’s not worth the pressure. I put him and my youngest into activities to make them more rounded, swimming, skating, baseball, soccer cross-country skiing. Occasionally they come up with an interest and I let them go, this year it’s acting/theater. I stay minimally involved, let them have their space, and their fun, they are only a child once why should I ruin it for them?

Also I learned something from doing a 1st grade project with my son. Jesse Owens known as one of the best athletes of all time who won 4 gold medals and broke several world records did not join the track team till he was in high school. So there you go. One of the greatest runners of all time and he did not start till high school. Boom. Blows up these theories of you have to do stuff from age 3 to be any good at it.

The person who wrote in to the parenting message board should find a new piano teacher for her daughter, because burnout at seven years old isn’t a good thing. If she could take lessons with someone who’s more low-key, and student-focused, she’d probably find it a lot more fun, and be more likely to stick with piano in the long run. Maybe someday, she’ll want to take it more seriously, but that day isn’t today, and that’s okay. I mean, okay, it’s good to teach kids to honour their commitments, but at the same time, it’s also good to teach them to check in with themselves, and judge for themselves when any one commitment (or combination of commitments) is getting to be too much. I bet these piano lessons started out as “an hour of lessons every Wednesday after school, and 30 minutes of practice per day,” or some such, which sounds reasonable, but then the teacher started ramping up the requirements (Really? Nine songs from memory AND all the major and minor scales, at age SEVEN?!?!?!), so more practice time was needed, and this was in addition to school, Tae Kwon Do, Brownies, family time, food, sleep, and personal hygiene, and what was once a fun extra-curricular activity started being Serious Business, and no longer fun. That’s not to say that every child who starts something and then doesn’t want to practice, should be let off the hook, but it’s partly incumbent upon the adult leaders of these activities (music teachers, sports coaches, Scout/Guide leaders, etc.), to set attainable and age-appropriate goals for the kids, and/or help the kids set their own goals, within reason. For piano, this could be something along the lines of, “Susie, we’re having a recital in the spring. Can you pick your favourite piece from this book of music that’s at your level, and we’ll practice it so that it sounds beautiful for all of the parents and the other students?”

I agree, Emily – new piano teacher. I quit piano after about 5 years because my teachers ONLY taught classical, and I wanted to play something fun. Regretted it ever since. We have a fantastic piano teacher for my girls – she does themed recitals (last one was popular music – one of my kids played a Phillip Phillips song and the other played something from a Doctor Who score; she always does a costume recital at Halloween and they play music themed to that). She plays games to teach them theory. She lets them choose a lot of their music but works in some classical stuff too. They do one competition each year similar to the one described in that post, but they only have to memorize one piece. They’re getting a sound musical education without being pushed to the burnout point. I wish I’d had a teacher like this!

I have mixed feelings about the whole child-led business. In my experience that’s a bit too idealistic, and if we left it all up to the kids, I’m not sure they’d ever finish anything 😀 We’ve tried to find a happy medium – letting them try new things (musical instruments, dance, different sports) but requiring them to stick with a few others, like piano. There’s no one-size fits all answer. Kids are all different.

SOA,
Your theory on Jesse Owens is flawed………..

A great number of former greats in a lot of sports would never make it today. The athletes are simply, bigger, stronger, faster, and more skilled today, than ever before.
Babe Ruth would be lucky to be playing semi pro today.
Kareem would not last a whole season against the players today.
Jesse Owens would not even make it to the olympic team.

You cannot compare the athletes of yesteryear to the ones today. It would be like comparing a Model T to a Corvette, not even the same species.

We have a pretty awesome Y by us. When we joined I signed my monster (now 3) up for the parent child gymnastics class and the parent-child swim class. Classes only last for 5 weeks, so every time it time to register for new classes I always tell him the options that fit for us schedule-wise and let him choose which if any he wants to do. He did gymnastics, which he calls Superhero class, for 6 monthes, but decided not to this time. He’s also tried soccer once, but wasn’t a fan. He just doing swim this time. I’m not sure what he’ll want to do when we sign up again in a couple weeks.

How to make something you love work:

In high school went to the library weekly and got grocery bags full of books and read them each week. Things like The Three Musketeers, Count of Monte Crisco, Edger Allen Poe, loads of science fiction and horror. The summer before 12th grade the school made us write 3 book reports. And, because I knew I should read for them, and I didn’t want to….I read nothing all summer. I did the book reports the day before school on books that I had read in the past.

My older son, 12, has issues with writing. It is really hard for him. He is getting tutoring/special ed help, and the teacher has him write a paragraph about what he has read. Sigh. Because he is the same as I am. So I assign short stories for him to read so that he will still read the stuff he likes.

How to not make it “work”, but to make it more like fun:

My youngest son is dyslexic. He is making great strides, and is enthralled with Magic Tree House books. He does not want to read the school book style book with stories and worksheets. So…because we homeschool, we read Magic Tree House. They are a little below grade level where his special ed teacher would like him but I see steady growth and ability to read more and more words correctly. He is competitive, so this summer he will officially, on his own (not me reading to him) participate in the summer library reading program. I think his skills are really going to take off. But the special ed teacher would prefer that I challenge him with stuff on grade level – stuff that is too hard. Nope. We tried that for years….it doesn’t work. Reading should be effortless, not a challenge unless the child wants a challenge.

My oldest child has always loved writing. She entered the Reading Rainbow story contest every year until they ended the show. Her curriculum had “writing” as part of the schooling. And she hated it. Like the other poster, she quit writing. So, for 7th and 8th grade we changed focus. She has a little grammar to do daily (and even that I don’t really care about.) She does SAT prep vocabulary quiz and writes silly sentences for the words. (She loves this.) She gets to free read what she wants. (She is working on the Iliad. Good choice, in my opinion.) She orally tells me about what she is reading. Composition….she writes. She is writing a novel and various stories. Sometimes she shows them to me, some she shares with friends, and some she takes to a novel writing class. And it is all good. Next year she will be going to a high school and will not have the freedom to choose. But…there are ways to make the assignments more fun. (But, I will tell her to not emulate me with an assignment I did for Spanish. The chapter was on careers, and we were supposed to write in Spanish about one. So, because writing about being a teacher is not interesting, I wrote about being an assassin. It WAS one of the choices. Not that I really wanted to do that, but the teacher did take me aside to have a “talk” about if I really wanted to do it or not. Today, I think that I would have been kicked out of school, made to see a shrink, and all sorts of other over reactions.)

My kids don’t really like organized activities. I encourage them to try new things and make them stick it out once they’ve committed, but most people today would consider them “underscheduled.” Fortunately, we live in a neighborhood where kids play impromptu soccer at the park, organize their own backyard baseball season, and wander around unsupervised on their bikes. It’s amazing how a free range culture can build — parents see kids out and feel better sending their own kids out. Don’t give up on making this happen in your own neighborhood. I can’t take the credit in my neighborhood — years ago I was the parent cringing at the unsupervised four year olds — but I’m so grateful. My son is never going to be a star athlete thanks to genetics, but the travel baseball kids treat him like an equal in the backyard, and honestly I think they also prefer that to their competitive leagues. There really is a place for both. I also second the YMCA recommendation — that’s the only place where we found fun, non-competitive gymnastics for all ages.

I face this problem myself as an adult. As a kid I had no problem simply playing at things. I’d write stories without worrying whether they were any good, I’d start inventing languages without a worry about whether I would finish them.

Now as an adult, it’s much harder to play; I’m haunted by guilt over what I *should* be doing instead, or I’m fretting about whether the thing I’m writing is “good enough”, or I’m trying to figure out how to turn this fun activity into a way to make some money. It’s very frustrating.

Kids will have plenty of time to be adults.

Woops, hit enter too soon.

If dyslexie works, it would be great if any e-book font could be translated into it.

On the whole subject of making something work, can I just rant about reading logs?

We have always read to our kids, since they were babies. I remember when my oldest was in first grade he was home sick and I read an entire Bobbsey Twins book, cover to cover, to this kid for 4 hours straight and he loved it. He’s dyslexic, so his comprehension outpaces his independent reading, but he has explored a lot of books via text to speech as well.

At least until they asked him to track it. Every year since first grade, he’s been required to write down every book he reads, and the author and the pages, and God forbid you should put a book down and start another before the first one is finished. They have made it such a chore that he either refuses to read, or refuses to write down what he’s read. He is forever getting terrible grades on his independent reading, because he does not want his reading measured, monitored, and dissected. He hates most fiction, with a passion, but will read non-fiction for days. He likes to start books, skip around to different chapters, go back and reread – he’s very nonlinear about it. My personal point of view is that as long as he is reading and comprehending, I don’t really care exactly what he reads, or whether it is for 20 minutes a day, or 15, or 30. But the schools have taken something he loved and turned it into something he hates.

And just a note to the homeschool folks: I admire you for what you do, but it truly isn’t an option for my family due to financial constraints and temperament (i.e. we’d go broke and kill each other in a week). All we can do is pray that eventually we’ll get to a grade where they stop these wretched reading logs.

E Simms, dyslexie sounds really cool. Makes me want to go see what existing fonts might work best for my son, as some may have some things similar.

I refuse to force extracurricular activities on my daughter. She has some really amazing talents, but I know that pushing the issue will kill them faster than anything. If I sense that she’s in a receptive mood I can try to “stealth teach” her, but the second she’s caught on I back off and change the subject.

She knows that as soon as she shows interest in taking a lesson in something, I will move heaven and earth to find the money and time to make it happen. I like that she knows that she has my full support one way or the other, and neither choice makes me love her any differently than I already do.

@JKP I LOVE the idea of “natural benefits” and the diary idea. That is brilliant.

@BMS, Reading logs are from the Devil! My daughter reads all day, and half the night if I let her. She can’t be bothered to fill out the logs, because she’s too busy reading! How’s that for irony? I don’t bug her to fill them out, I just let her deal with the consequences at school. I refuse to be the reading log police.

She struggles terribly with math, if it’s written down on a page and she has to sit and stare at it. I recently took her to Israel, and gave her some shekels to spend. I told her she has to convert them to US dollars, and then we discuss if the price is good, or if things would cost more or less in the US. From there we would decide if it would be better to buy it now, or wait until we got home. We talked about the markup on importing and exporting, too. (BTW, she’s in 5th grade) She did great!

I hated reading logs. We had to do them in A. Samoa and neither of us remembered half the time. And we only had to write down the name of the book! So glad our current elementary school doesn’t do them.

I’m so very glad that nobody has figured out how to make hiking a competitive sport.

We’re dealing with this right now. My barely 8yo is playing baseball. He has practice up to three times a week and up to four games a week (due to rescheduled rainouts). The practices have been known to go up to three hours. I haven’t complained because we homeschool, so he still has plenty of time at home, but I think the other parents are crazy for allowing it.

Haava, I can’t tell you how envious I am of your Montessori class discussions. I would have thought I’d died and gone to heaven in a situation like that. Still would.

>>I’m so very glad that nobody has figured out how to make hiking a competitive sport.<<

What about orienteering?

Or do they get paid to do it?

Sounds out of control to me…

I also hate reading logs. I don’t want to chart and measure my reading. Takes all the pleasure out of it. This is from a kid that was at the bookstore every week and they knew me by name and would put books back from me as soon as they came in. My mom just taught me to sign her name like she did and told me to sign the reading log for her because she did not care to monitor my reading.

Also every book I was forced to read in school I disliked. Just about every one. Because dissecting it and analyzing it and not being allowed to read ahead and being tested on it took all the pleasure out of it. So I pretty much hate every classic novel as those are the ones I mostly had to read in school and yep, made me hate them.

Interesting article on youth sports and parents. My son plays in a league for kids who don’t make the “travel teams” in a particular sport, and we still had a father this year who constantly yelled at his son. I wish I hadn’t felt intimidated by him and said something not just under my breath. Even in our league, where everyone gets to play, there’s pressure to have a winning season and to advance in the end of year tournament. Couldn’t it just be about kids having fun together playing a game they like? It’s fine for kids to learn about winning and losing graciously, but some parents become so focused on winning. Even on my youngest child’s kindergarten team, where there’s no scorekeeping, a mom had to remind a parent coach that it’s supposed to be fun.

It’s funny how different the kids are in their pick-up games with no adult involvement. According to my son, everyone is welcome to play, except the kids who take it too seriously and get angry about “bad calls.” They make up rules and work out disagreements. Please encourage your kids to invite neighbors of all ages and start games in the backyard or the neighborhood park!

Would Jesse Owens have made it today starting in high school? Quite possibly not. Even as recently as my youth, there were no track teams before middle or high school. We did a unit on it in PE each year and had field day, but it wasn’t an organized sport, so EVERYONE started around high school. Today my daughter is being encouraged to join a track team at 8 (completely against any genes inherited from me, she’s a fabulous distance runner).

Innate ability only gets you so far. All these activities take learned skills as well. If everyone else starts learning at 5, you never get the chance to hone your innate abilities because you are sitting on the bench in favor of the rest of the team’s much greater learned skill set if you start at 14. If you have the ability to hire a private coach to get you up to the skills of the other 14 year olds, your innate ability will set you above them, but few can afford to hire a private coach and most are going to be discouraged from even trying.

Donna, I am the same way, but my youngest kid is wired completely opposite. 😛 Not much I can do about it. I can hope the re-wiring of puberty/adolescence helps, but who knows….

Life with this little person is pretty much an endless series of “choose my battles.”

Being told my interpretations of Huckleberry Finn were wrong, and *this* is what the author meant by the presence of the Mississippi River RUINED Huck Finn for me. I’d loved that book when I read it as a kid, but high school English ruined it. I’m just now thinking about reading it again as an adult. I’m 46!

Emily, I agree that there are bad teachers/assignments that suck the life out of anything and assignments that don’t appeal. That is different from the many who are saying that they or their kids automatically hated something just because it was assigned rather than something that they chose to do themselves.

It was not just because the books were assigned that made me hate them. I hated being told my interpretation of it was “wrong”. I hated being tested on it. I hated having to over analyze it. I hated being only allowed to read 2 chapters a night even if one night I felt like skipping it or one night I felt like reading 6 chapters. That is what made me hate them.

And subject choice. Honestly “Grapes of Wrath” is just awful. As a 16 year old I did not want to read about dogs getting run over, people starving to death, a man leaving his girlfriend pregnant with his child, and a woman breastfeeding a starving man. Gross. Sorry a 16 year old kid in this time period is NOT going to be able to relate to that at all. I am a history major so I appreciate learning about the past but reading history accounts is a totally different thing that reading literature and they should not always mix. I just did not care for it. Same with “Old Man and the Sea” when I was 14. Same with Shakespeare. I enjoyed the story line of most Shakespeare but the language was just too much. I always got As in English so it was not that it was over my head. I just did not care for it. You can’t make someone like it.

The few school books I did care for I did enjoy but they were few and far between honestly. For one thing why does school books ALWAYS have to be so depressing!? Can we have just one happy book once? I like to mix it up. I will read one historical fiction, then a horror novel, then a sci fi novel, then a romance. In school it was pretty much one depressing book after another. Blech. Like teenagers are not already angsty. The one school book I liked was “Daisy Fae and the Miracle Man”. It was funny and charming. Made me want to read the rest of Fannie Flagg’s stuff.

So it was not that I was incapable of enjoying school books, just that I rarely ever did.

@SKL I found The Catcher in the Rye interesting at that age. I found it in parents library and read it multiple times. Oddly enough, my father later told that he brought the book, but disliked it and never finished.

I’ll encourage my kids to play school sports because it’s a convenient way to make sure they get exercise. However, one of mine has some physical issues and might decide it isn’t worth the stress of having teammates / classmates pressure her. We’ll see when the time comes. I played softball in 5th grade and quit because it was really uncomfortable socially. It isn’t for everyone. I’m glad we have access to alternatives such as recreational gymnastics.

There are a ton of comments already, but I’m going to add mine and then read through.

My husband and I own a youth competitive soccer club. We have teams from U9 (under-9) up to U18, both boys and girls. Each team is pretty autonomous, as our coaches are all certified and sort of run the show, growing as their kids grow – ie our current U14 boys team has had the same coach since they were U9. We only provide a “registration umbrella” for them and stay fairly hands off.

My own children are 2 and 4.5. And I hope they stink at soccer and never leave house league. The U10 girls coach has them practicing twice a week, plus the game, plus an “optional” (not really optional) fitness training session. They go to 5 tournaments every (short) summer, which is basically an entire weekend event. They practice indoors all winter, twice a week. They are NINE YEARS OLD. In my opinion, this is ridiculous.

My husband coaches U14 girls and senior women and has one practice and one game per week, and two tournaments. His girls are just as competitive in their divisions, and they don’t burn out.

@Warren, I believe there are High School sprinters that have run faster than Owens’ (at the time) world record.

Babe Didrikson (one of my childhood biographies read!) picked up golf successfully after her track career — another highly unlikely scenario today.

Owens might be a world class sprinter today, but he wouldn’t do it using the same approach as he did 80 years ago! He’d be following the path that most world class athletes do.

Ag, this is so frustrating to me. I took piano lessons for years from my grandmother. She had a whole studio though, 16 or so of us in all. When I got older, I started training more for competitions because I wanted to; that was never something she specialized in. The only thing we all had to do was play a little concert once or twice a year, usually around Christmas and sometimes in the summer. It gave us a goal and it’s good practice for being able to perform (or speak) in public.

Isn’t that enough, really? Parents like to see their kids perform. Why does everyone have to be scored on everything? Yes, it is scary to perform in front of people, even when you know them, but it’s nothing compared to playing in front of judges who will give you a grade and critique you. Kids just don’t need that sort of pressure unless they want it.