Case in point. A few years ago my son got involved in a basketball program called Upwards. It's a christian based sports program wherein the youngsters are encouraged to grow both physically and spiritually through the vehicle of sport and competition. Competition my ass. These kids were verbally told every practice and every game that winning didn't matter. That you can't play too hard because someone might get hurt. That every team member, regardless of ability or desire to do well gets the same amount of game time. You know what they did if a team was down by more than six points during a game? They stopped keeping score. What a bunch of crap. This rhetoric is supposed to prepare these kids to be better humans and give them tools to go into the real world? On their website they claim to want to bring out "the winner in every child - regardless of the game's score." In other words, it doesn't matter how well you do the things that you put your time and attention towards accomplishing. It's all a-okay. As long as you tried, right? You even get a trophy at the end. Everybody gets a trophy. They're even all the same size, shape, and color. As a parent I couldn't allow this influence on my boy any more. I took him out. EVERYONE should take their kids out, and Upwards should die an immediate and quiet death. Yet every year, MILLIONS of American kids are subjected to this crap by their parents. It's like this interchange in one of my favorite movies, The Incredibles. Elastagirl says, "Everyone's special, Dash." To which Dash insightfully replies, "Which is another way of saying no one is."
Pardon me, but... what the hell? Think about your daily life. Do you sometimes wish that you made more money? How about that you looked a little better in that swimsuit? Or that your words were more respected by the people around you? You know why you are where you are today? It's the direct result of the sum total of all the choices that you've made in your life. Crappy thing to hear, I know. It means that you are the only one responsible for the things you hate about your life. Personally, I think it all started when they took the jungle gym off the playground.
Remember those things? Hell, the one at my grade school was even on gravel. It was rusty and had lots of sharp corners. It was, quite frankly, frightening. You know why it was frightening? Because you could get hurt. You know what the circumstances that might lead to you getting hurt were? You tried doing something that was new. You tried something that wasn't the safest choice. In other words, you were adventurous. You dared to dream about what it might be like to hang upside down from the top bar by your knees. Here's the kicker. If it didn't work the first time, you tried it again in a different way until you succeeded. Doing it made you feel good. It was rewarding, and gave you a sense of accomplishment.
Kids today are no different than kids from any other age. They have the same inherent sense of adventure and exploration. It's just being killed by their parents and teachers. We can't put a jungle gym there because someone might get hurt. We don't play dodge ball any more because of the favoritism that it encourages in kids and their playmates and someone's feelings might get hurt. That paper that you wrote for English class and failed miserably on because you aint got none good grammer can't be graded in red pen because it might make you feel bad.
The worst part of all that is the end result that it has on the kids. We're insulating them from any possibility of physical pain in the process of being a kid and exploring their boundaries, which is to say that we're encouraging them to NOT explore their boundaries. The big problem with this is that it migrates into their thoughts as well, and they end up being insulated from the possibility of any emotional pain in their life that could result from taking chances. Go ahead and just merge into the status quo. Don't make waves. Don't innovate. Don't try to be exceptional.
If you're a parent or a teacher, you need to wake the hell up. We're training out of our kids the very things that this country is going to need in the immediate future. We're going to need entrepreneurs. We're going to need inventors. We're going to need political leaders who are willing to speak the truth instead of just saying what they think needs to be said to get them reelected, and we're going to need voters who are willing to listen to those people and think for themselves. We're going to need fathers who aren't afraid to discipline their children. We're going to need mothers who know the difference between coddling and nurturing.
In the last ten years I've been exposed to a LOT of kids through community programs and whatnot. Literally several thousand that I've gotten to know well enough to assess their character. I find 95% of them lacking the characteristics needed to fulfill any one of those requirements that I listed above.
Wake up. Teach your kids that it's alright to try new things. Teach them that it's alright to fail. Then teach them that they need to learn from that failure and try again. Otherwise in 30 years you won't be worried any more about the fact that Social Security is broke and you still have to work at age 70... because you won't be a citizen of the U.S. any more. You'll be a citizen of the newly established Communist Republic of Chinese American Protectorates.
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