Reply to Would you want/hope your son/daughter become a professional player?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]No, this is a stupid goal for your children. If someone told me this was their hope for their kid, I would assume they were a deluded, terrible parent, and there is a 99.999% chance I'd be right.

If they happened to be in the .001% that proved me wrong, more power to them.

But they wouldn't be! Your kids will not be pro soccer players, and even if they were, they would probably be middling and make terrible money while risking some kind of injury and squandering opportunities to do literally anything else with their lives.[/quote]

So the parents of every NBA, MLB, NFL, NHL, Olympian, Indy Driver, Jockey etc etc etc are Delusional Idiots?[/quote]

Unless they were successful pro athletes themselves, yes. For every family who pours their money and time into producing an NFL starter or an Olympic gymnast, there are thousands of families with the exact same goal who piss all that money and energy into a goal that never happens. And I'm not just talking about the kids who never really stood a shot. I'm talking about the really talented, hard working ones who come really close, but don't make it. They finish just out if contention for the Olympic team, they suffer a catastrophic injury playing college ball, they become depressed or develop an anxiety disorder, they are amazing but impossible to work with, they make the practice squad but never advance, the timing works out so their years on contention have too many similar athletes who are a little better, and on and on.

Yes, you are a delusional idiot if you hope your kid is going to make it as a professional athlete. Just because a teeny tiny number of these idiots one day get an NBC Sports feature where they tearfully explain that they always knew their kid would go all the way does not make this any less true.[/quote]

Are the parents of aspiring doctors, lawyers also idiots?
Many don't make it even though a lot do.[/quote]

There are WAY more doctors and lawyers in the world than professional athletes. This is a stupid comparison. But actually I do think it's dumb to *focus* on your kid becoming a doctor or a lawyer. The good news is that if you encourage your kid to do well at school and support them in that, they could decide along the way to do something less ambitious and be fine. You can aspire to be a lawyer and wind up a paralegal and actually that's a perfectly good career. You can plan on becoming a doctor, realize you don't have the work ethic but still love medicine and science, and wind up working in a research lab, or in another career in the medical profession without spending years of your life and racking up loans in med school.

But making "professional soccer player" your aim has no good, lesser option you can bail out for if it turns out you don't have what it takes (and the vast majority of people don't). Sure, you can coach soccer. But that's a crap career, and also, if you never played professionally you are unlikely to get any of the best coaching jobs or ever be paid particularly well (whereas if you become a paralegal instead of a lawyer, you can still go on to work at the top law firms in the world, for instance).

Pinning your hopes on your kid beating a billion to one odds is just dumb. Not saying don't encourage them to try their hardest, do travel soccer, try and make their varsity team in high school, maybe even pursue it in college. Just saying that making pro athlete/Olympian your express goal is more likely to result in disappointment, failure, and family dysfunction than not. A lot more likely, actually.[/quote]

You obviously don't know that the years of discipline and work ethic pays off even in the corporate world if you don't make it to top Pro
Not to mention the network.

Where can we find all these failed soccer players fighting pigeons for crumbs in the park?[/quote]

You don't get it. No one is saying to discourage your kid from working hard and dedicated themselves to soccer. No one. This is the soccer forum. Presumably most people in here have kids in soccer and want them to do their best. The question is whether YOUR hope for them would be to become a professional player. And my point is that it does not make sense for a parent to make this their hope or goal. It's fine if it's your kids' goal and it's fine to support them in it. But your job is to be more level headed and make sure they have a backup plan so if it doesn't happen (and it probably won't), they can channel all their dedication and work ethic into something else.

The fact that you are SO MAD about this suggestion that parents should avoid making this a personal goal for their kids indicates to me that you are precisely the kind of parent who could stand to think a bit more expansively about your kids' future, in soccer and out of it.[/quote]

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