In my career, I work with many different types of athletes. I have a client who’s training to hone his skills as a lacrosse player. During our second session, his father hovered around a footwork drill on the field.
“Move your $%^ feet!”
“Pay attention, dumb ass!”
“I’m not spending all of this money for you to ride the bench all season.”
Overbearing parents—or helicopter parents as they’re now called—is nothing new. It’s a phenomenon that pre-dates team sports. Always anticipate what your opponent will do before he even decides to do it is something I learned from a basketball coach. Coaches are entrusted with the job to help mold boys in those formative years of adolescence. We look to coaches to affirm the life lessons that will transform weak, indecisive, uncoordinated boys into men who know how to dominate and act with conviction. The problem with that is the process isn’t always on target with the end result.
The problem we encounter in raising trophy kids is that they don’t really learn how to be good men or productive members of society.
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The other night, I stumbled on the documentary Trophy Kids on Netflix. It follows the lives of 5 kids who are seriously immersed in their sport of choice. Throughout the documentary, fathers are berating their sons. Each father is obsessive about their son’s performance and every error during a game is corrected by humiliation.
Many fathers treat their sons as trophies because they see them as a second chance to do something great. One of the dads featured in the film actually talks about how he’s never done anything worthwhile in his life. He has hopes for his son to do something great athletically. The problem we encounter in raising trophy kids is that they don’t really learn how to be good men or productive members of society. More often, playing sports is how they learn firsthand to act like robots. By forcing boys to play sports as a method to toughen them up, we’re actually handicapping them emotionally.
In ancient times, boys as young as 8 were snatched from the simplicity of childhood and thrown into the callousness of manhood. Fathers trained their sons, sometimes before the boys even knew why they were training, to be prepared for battle. The instruction served its purpose because soldiers were needed.
One thing I notice in overzealous dads is that often they’re projecting their failures and mistakes on their son’s’ future.
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We’ve carried that same mentality over into sports. We force them into team sports without much free will. We say it’s about building character, but that’s not true for every coach or every dad. Winning is all that matters. Winning means attention. Attention means prestigious college offers. And those offers will hopefully lead to money and some fame. Although looking at raw statistics, your son—regardless of how hard he trains and practices—has a miniscule chance of going pro. The reality is, most of our sons just aren’t going to be good enough. Helicopter parents don’t have the self-awareness to watch their kid play a sport for years and understand that.
One thing I notice in overzealous dads is that often they’re projecting their failures and mistakes on their son’s’ future. They zero in on a sport and invest all they have into making their kid the best and most promising for that next level. For example, if a father had a chance to go pro in football and blew his knee out, his son is viewed as his shot at redemption. He’s going to ride his son much harder than a dad who may see sports as just an activity, something to do. For many athletes, they lived the narrative of being the family’s meal ticket. Not making it wasn’t an option. Sometimes, the pressure worked out for the best as is the case for LeBron James. However, for every LeBron, there’s thousands of guys who cracked under the pressure and never recovered.
We shouldn’t view our kids’ successes as making up for our losses. We shouldn’t force dreams on kids simply because we fell short.
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I’m not saying we shouldn’t push our kids. We should notice talent or interests early and nurture them. What I’m saying is our motivations aren’t always pure. The way we communicate having a winner’s mentality and admonishing quitting can be more damaging than we know. We shouldn’t view our kids’ successes as making up for our losses. We shouldn’t force dreams on kids simply because we fell short.
Kids are second chances to create a different legacy. We can change bad habits or instill core values when they’re young to produce better men. At the same time, we have to be mindful that the bonding experience of playing sports should enrich healthy father-son relationships.
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