If you see a clump of children wearing bright uniforms involved in some type of sporting activity, nearby are sure to be a throng of parents watching with great interest. It might feel nowadays that it couldn’t be any other way. It’s like the old tree-falling-in-the-forest thought experiment: [1] If children played a game and their parents didn’t see it, did the game actually happen?
In the great little collection of essays Coach [2], edited by Andrew Blauner, writers reflect on people “who made a difference,” mostly coaches. Many themes emerge in these reflective essays, but one that particularly struck me was how often one of the writers, thinking back several decades about their youth sports adventures, mentions being bewildered and sometimes annoyed if a parent was “caught” watching.
Journalist and writer David Maraniss remembers a teammate calling out to him during a baseball game, “Hey, Dave, is that your dad standing over there behind the tree?” Maraniss writes, “That scene just about said it all. A parent sighting was so outlandish that it would be called out, and so out of the ordinary that it required a hiding place.” Sportscaster Bob Wolff captures a similar sentiment in remembering his youthful pickup games: “… there were no coaches, no umpires, no spectators, no fights, and above all, no parents.” Forget the arrogant self-importance of instant replay, which has infected big-times sports; in Wolff’s world, if there was a doubt about a ball or strike, they threw the pitch again. Kids made the rules and worked out their own differences.
But our culture has changed, and parents today are a regular presence at youth athletic events. They watch. They provide constant advice. They make and enforce the rules. Maybe it’s too much to think that these experiences on athletic fields will create a generation of kids who are totally dependent on adult guidance, on authority. But last summer, a bunch of neighborhood kids would gather behind my house for this hodgepodge version of hockey using gardening knee pads, lacrosse and hockey sticks, baseball gloves, football helmets, pop-up soccer goals, and a racquetball. One day, I strolled out to watch. As I arrived, the racquetball bounced into the bushes. All of the kids looked at me to make the call.
You see, despite all my high-falutin’ ideas, I could be one of the top offenders of over-involved parenting. Not only do I watch my three children, but I coach them in almost everything. Even when they are all involved with their different teams, I find myself at almost every practice. If I’m not coaching, I’m in the stands.
Is what I’m doing wrong? It doesn’t feel that way. I can’t believe how much I enjoy watching them jump, run, wrestle, tumble, kick, throw, and learn how to navigate their bodies through space. It’s pure joy for me. Still, I wonder if this might be driven by selfish reasons: I mean, I guess there’s an element of self-interest in all love — Alexandre Dumas [3] said, ““Love is the most selfish of all the passions” — but how much of what I am doing is for them?
I’m not trying to make anyone feel guilty. Us parents raised and put up with the little buggers, so if we enjoy watching them play their games, then we should. But I wonder if we’re being honest about it. We don’t watch because they need us there, because without us in the stands the whole operation falls to pieces. No. Even if we might argue that they now look in the stands for us, that may only be because we’ve been there all along. It’s not the comfort of our audience or the support it represents as much as the normalcy of it.
I’m in for the long haul at this point; it would be a kind of cold turkey family torture for me to stop watching their performances. But if I step back, can I say that it might be better if dad wasn’t there all the time? If I really want to analyze this, might I come to the conclusion that though my cheering and even my coaching are subdued, I may inadvertently be building in them an extrinsic-driven reward structure, one in which they feel validated because I am there, rather than intrinsic, in which they take part in sports because they want to?
While there are some parents whose fan behavior is reprehensible — you know them — most parent fandom is probably fine. But we might want to think a little more about what all our spectatorship means. If the joy of the game for our kids becomes too intertwined with the approval of an ever-surveillant parent, will they have a raw moment in which they wonder why they were ever playing in the first place?
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[6]Scott Warnock [7]
[6]Latest posts by Scott Warnock (Posts [8])
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