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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]PP here, who posted a long story about my son.

If parents want to guide their kids toward certain sports, that's their decision. However, I'll push back against those who criticize parents for allowing their kids to pursue the sports they love. The discussions here is primarily about late growers who are talented at their sports but have gotten to an age where their size and strength are causing them to be pushed down the pack, which shows in cuts, reduced playing time, and lack of respect from coaches or teammates. This change in status comes at what seems like the worst time, middle school when kids naturally struggle anyway.

Most parents of kids who love sports have given them the opportunity to try many different activities, as noted by many PPs. My own tried soccer, tennis, basketball, golf, flag football, hockey, and gymnastics to find what he loved the most. I couldn't have pushed him away from soccer and basketball if I wanted to (and I didn't want to). If you are talented, you tend to enjoy the sports where you have success. There's nothing wrong with switching to an individual sport from a team sport if an uncontrollable factor like size is getting in the way. But there's also nothing wrong with seeing if you can push if that's important.

In any event, small kids' struggles and parents' pain watching them is less about the sport and more how kids navigate self-doubt, rejection, and sometimes flat-out cruelty. How do these setbacks that impact them as human beings? Does not being one of the best change how they feel about an activity they once loved? After devoting years to this sport at which they excelled, a kid now receiving messages that they aren't that good has to figure out where the sport fits in as a part of their identity. Is it important to keep working and ride the bench, waiting to grow and go through puberty? Is there another way to fill the hole left if the child quits the sport? Does dropping back to a less competitive team make sense? If the kid sticks with the sport, what other aspects of the game can they work on to compensate for lack of size and strength (game IQ, playmaking, lifting weights)? This is how resilience is developed.

In addition to my son, I have a DD who is also an athlete. In sports, I've seen both kids suffer humiliating lows that hurt like hell. But you know what? Even after being playing on a team that lost every game by a wide margin, or being the only athlete on a team that didn't qualify for states, or having your name in the paper for missing the critical play in a game, the world didn't end. They kept going. We still loved them, their their friends still cared about them, and anyone who held failures against them wasn't on their side anyway. For my DD, her low in one sport led her to focus on another one. For my son, his small stature is an integral part of who he is, regardless of what sport he plays. He's the youngest in his grade, and has always been the smallest, so being an underdog is a fact of life. He wrote his college essay about how he has learned to understand his size as a blessing and a curse. You don't have to wind up a pro or a DI scholarship athlete to learn life lessons through sports. The truth is that the more your kid cares about a sport (not you, as a parent, but your kid) the higher the highs and the lower the lows for them. It's ok to hurt. It's ok to get every shot blocked by a six footer. It's ok to move on from a sport when it isn't right anymore. As much as it killed me to watch my kids struggle, on balance, the lows of their athletic experience made them stronger and more determined than the highs. You just have make it through the bad times until they adjust and help them figure out what is important to them.

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Thanks for this. There's some wisdom here.[/quote]

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