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it’s the best time of the year. spring training is right around the corner. the great game will greet the boys of summer with the smell of freshly cut grass and the sound of the cracking of bats. yup…it’s the best time of the year.
i love going to kids baseball games. i went to one recently. pretty exciting game. some good pitching, some shoddy fielding, a couple of timely hits, and a bunch of whining about how bad the umpires were. yeah, it was a normal game.
on the way out, i was behind a dad and his son and another player. they were from the losing team. obviously, the losing team whined a lot louder about the umpire than the winning team…and this dad (as best as i could hear) was having the same conversation that parents of young athletes have all the time:
“…it’s not your fault. there was no way you could hit with that kind of an umpire. they stole the game from us. how can anybody play with that kind of bias? you couldn’t have any confidence in the strike zone. those umpires took you out of your game. blah. blah. blah.”
i will admit that i generally have a different take on the whole umpiring thing than most (in that one of my sons is an umpire), but i’ve also been the dad of athletes my whole life. I have walked off the ball field many times, helping my sons face the reality of a loss.
i’ve also listened for years to parents make excuses for their kids, instead of helping them face reality. on the ballfield…and also in life.
“it’s not your fault.” “you just got on the wrong team.” “we don’t have enough money.” “your teacher isn’t being fair.” “don’t the police have something better to do?” “they’re giving way to much homework.” “the administration is always showing favoritism.” “that family gets all the breaks.”“the other team was cheating.”“you’re special. you’re not like the other kids.”
you get the picture.
parents, you’ve got to stop crippling your kids. stop making excuses for them. stop teaching them to make excuses. we’re a culture of excuse givers. it’s time to stop.
we’ve got to teach our kids to step up and take responsibility…not just for their actions…but for their attitudes when things don’t go their way. we live in an imperfect world. it is full of injustice. it is full of people who won’t treat our kids the way they (and we) think they should be treated.
hey. life is difficult. don’t complain that you didn’t get get three perfect pitches. sometimes you only get one good pitch to hit. shut up. swing your bat. give it your best shot. if you miss, go back to the bench and figure out what you did wrong and what you could do better.
there.
and if you think this post is about baseball, you just swung and missed.
( by the way, here’s a link to north point’s youth ministry blog. some good thoughts on parenting this week…)
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