Sometimes as parents we forget how simple and subtle life’s lessons can be.
I was reminded of this yesterday afternoon when I heard the cheers of young people playing a Little League baseball game in the nearby city park. It’s amazing when the noise of children playing can carry sound half a block away and right up to your open living room window.
Little league baseball games can get rowdy. Kids get excited when the bases are loaded and their next hitter sends a whooping line into the outfield.
They know the outfielder will probably punt the ball, and when it goes through him on its merry way to the fence, all three on base will score and the batter will probably walk home safely with a home run inside the park and 4 ribbies. exceeded) to his credit.
Ah baseball, spring is in the air and summer is coming.
The sheer fun of sport is so normal and so natural to our human experience.
I once read a study that interviewed hardened criminals who were serving life in prison for capital crimes, such as murder. A psychologist asked the inmates what they missed the most now that they spent the rest of their lives behind bars without the possibility of parole.
The answer surprised me, and it should surprise you too. What they missed the most was not his girlfriend, nor the sex, nor the drink, nor the drugs, nor the game; it was the sound of children playing. Perhaps the only real and positive memory they have of their life is when they were children playing.
These are two pressing extremes: children playing without a care in the world, and jailed criminals saddled with the reality that they will never be able to play freely again.
With all the violence we are seeing right now with young people solving their so-called “problems” by shooting their so-called “enemies” (often friends and family), I am reminded that some of our children today seem less capable of coping with adversity, and even less with patience.
How is it that they clearly lack coping skills and patience, two traits necessary to survive as adults?
You will need someone much smarter than me to give you the correct answer to this question.
I’ll leave that answer to what some educated professionals who study psychology think.
Meanwhile, I choose not to tell you what I think, but to share with you what I know.
Here is one thing about minor league baseball that is taught by some parents and by some leaders in some organizations that is really not worth teaching, and it is this:
Certain organizations have adopted the mistaken practice of rewarding every child on every team, regardless of their effort or performance. In other words, a team can lose every game all year and each kid gets a trophy for participating, a team photo, and their own baseball card with the cup on it.
Apparently, some parents don’t want to hurt their child’s feelings even though the child puts in little effort, is clearly incompetent in improving any skill in the game, doesn’t understand the game, and doesn’t really care about anything.
I doubt the parents in the example given have any idea what lessons they are teaching their children by insisting on this foolish practice of making their child feel like they have accomplished something.
First, they encourage mediocrity by rewarding nothing. Practice this stupidity for a few more generations and we’ll have our kids thinking they can show up to work as adults, do nothing, and get paid for their lack of skills, effort, and production.
Second, they are rewarding children for not having the concept of setting and achieving goals. Parents do not encourage any concept of self-improvement and do not provide any incentive to do so.
Third, they are not teaching learning skills about coping with failure, and they are not providing even a shred of understanding about the function of failure. Losers would be shocked to learn that successful people have failed more than losers ever thought of failing.
One of the big differences between losers and winners in the game of life is that when winners fail, they get back up, dust themselves off, learn from the experience, and try again.
Fourth, they devalue kids who work hard, fail, and then succeed by rewarding a group of kids who try hard and do nothing, learn nothing, and have no real sense of accomplishment.
I remember going door to door as a 9-year-old boy, looking for a sponsor for a baseball team he was putting together. I instinctively knew that the kids would want to be on my team if I got them a free baseball cap and T-shirt; then we would look like a real team. I had played in a team that had nothing; we couldn’t afford uniforms, we were lucky to have a glove or borrow a glove.
I found that sponsor, a company called Jewell Realty in Flint, Michigan. I found a sponsor because I was looking for a sponsor. The owners of that business were impressed that a 9-year-old had the guts to walk all over town and ask businesses to sponsor his irregular team. I put up with nos and getting kicked out of places because I wanted it so bad.
It was the year 1953 and we were terrible; we lost more games than we won. We were insulted, humiliated, slapped and kicked out, but I never quit, and I made sure my teammates didn’t either. When someone stopped trying, I kicked them off the team and found someone else.
Two years later we won the league championship, and when we did, I was surrounded by winners who had become my friends. I didn’t need my parents to do this for me, I didn’t need a nosy adult or youth counselor to do this for me, I needed to do this for myself.
When I got the guys together and we brought that trophy to Jewell Realty, we all shared in the excitement of winning. Later that summer, I would walk into Jewell Realty, see that trophy in the window, and know who I was and what I had become: a winner. Jewell Realty didn’t win that trophy, I won that trophy and I knew what it would take to win another one.
Our parents never saw us play, they were too busy working.
If someone had come in after that first season and given each of us a trophy for losing, we wouldn’t have accepted it. Think about it: the message they would have been sending us is that we think you’re so bad you could never win a title, so to soothe your precious little feelings, here’s a trophy for being a loser.
I think I would have spit in their faces. I was that competitive. I might have been a 9-year-old, but I didn’t need some nosy parents setting me goals that I thought were so low I’d trip over them walking down the baseball field.
If you think a 9-year-old can’t have some dignity, you’re dead wrong, and you’ve probably been wrong about a lot of things in your life.
Once we won that championship and experienced our moment of victory, you could have taken that trophy away from us and it wouldn’t have mattered. I knew what I had sacrificed to win that trophy, and after all the blood, sweat, and tears, nothing a stupid parent or adult could have done would have made me feel less about myself. I knew I was a winner and I wasn’t going to settle for less.
Parents, if you don’t understand one thing about parenting, understand this: if your child goes through their entire school term (kindergarten through high school graduation) and never experiences true success at anything, at less than one day is your life, your child will be disabled for life. Nothing could be more arcane, stupid and bovine.
Don’t you dare try to prevent your child from failing. Let them try, and when they fail, pick them up, dust them off, and encourage them to try again. It is in failure that we learn to succeed.
If you, as a parent, cannot be a winner in your own pathetic life, if all you have to offer is whine and complain about this and that, and bemoan how your child is being treated, then get out of the way and let that his son can’t finally win on his own.
Take a snapshot of two images.
In one, a boy is presented with a trophy, a team photo, and a baseball card with his picture of a loser who accomplished nothing. In the other snapshot, a kid is given just a trophy, or the team is given a trophy to look up to, because they’ve put in the effort, honed their skills, played their hearts out, taken risks, and won a league title. Which one is your son?
Any child who has worked their way to the top of the mountain and experiences the sheer joy of competing and winning is someone who will go much further in life.
I can tell you from recruiting experience that there is an incredible correlation between athletic success in high school or college and success later in life. The reason is simple: the winners win and the losers don’t.
Do not misunderstand what I am sharing here. It’s not that you can’t earn more and better in life unless you are a successful athlete in your youth, it’s that you need to have a sense of accomplishment and recognition when doing something that requires a lot of work, dedication, effort and goals. It could be singing, it could be acting, it could be playing a musical instrument; just say any activity that allows you to fail, learn, improve, and succeed over a period of time.
It certainly helps to have a strong father in the house who helps teach his children what it is to be a winner, to learn coping skills, patience, hard work, dedication, effort, self-improvement and success. A strong single mom can do the same.
Do not play cake with your children when they are 9 years old, do not knowingly prepare them to fail in life, let them fight and succeed. If you don’t do this, they will be adults someday and won’t know how to act when being put down, insulted, mocked, and emotionally beaten. They will find out if you don’t protect them and their feelings so much that they become helpless and inept.
They will learn to cope and will be stronger for the experience. When they reach adulthood they will be able to dismiss the people around them who have mediocre minds and are mental dwarfs. They will be polite by treating these losers as irrelevant (which they are) and will not be affected by their negative presence.
They will then fast forward to be with the winners. It’s the losers who are left alone and wondering why.
Don’t play to participate, play to win. It is not winning that is all to end all, it is that in the process of winning we learn important skills that make us much more effective in playing and winning in the game of life. After all, life is not a resting place; life is a testing place, it is now and it will continue to be as long as you live.
A wise man said it and it is worth repeating it here: when everyone is somebody, nobody is nobody.
Copyright © 2007 Ed Bagley