Your son can start both of those things today. If he is 25 at 45 he will have 20 years experience.

He won’t though because it hard and he doesn’t like hard things. Academics was easy for him.

My elderly mother tells me that no matter what you do, your kids will blame you for something. She’s right. I wish my parents pushed me into sports and physical activity when I was younger. They didn’t focus on this at all. They pushed and encouraged various music lessons and theatre. I enjoyed theatre but dropped it all by high school. I hated music with a passion and always begged to stop. If they had pushed sports, maybe I would have hated that too.

Anonymous wrote:Kid is a real jacka$$ to put this on you. Sorry but that’s how I feel

+1. So the kid can take up his own hobby now, it’s not like it’s too late. What a jerk.

No. If anything, I regret not recognizing that he is a different person than me, of a different age and gender, living in different time and place. I have been learning to recognize that his strengths are his own. But I do prod him quite a bit anyway (which is normal for my circle).

Anonymous wrote:Kid is a real jacka$$ to put this on you. Sorry but that’s how I feel

+1. You want to learn how to play baseball as an adult? Go find a batting cage on the weekend and leave your adult parent alone. Geez.

Kid is a real jacka$$ to put this on you. Sorry but that’s how I feel

My challenge is to raise the child I have not the child I wish I had. I am grateful that I insisted he learn to swim starting at age 4 when he would cry when we made him do it. And it’s now a life skill he will hopefully engage in his entire life.

Anonymous wrote:Not so much pushing harder, but pushing differently.

Wish I knew what the differently was.

My kid blamed me for not teaching him to paddle a kayak. He learned to ski around the world, had a bilingual education and went to a world leading university. I told him that he could teach himself how to paddle.

2 things:
- everyone, your child and you included, has selective memory (remember what they want)
- hindsight is 20/20, but we all do the best we can, with the information we have on hand, at the time of any decision

Our college junior, over winter break, told DH and myself that we did a "pretty good" job of raising him. Laughing, I said, "only pretty good? What do you think we should have done differently?"

With a straight face, he claimed we should have made him clean his room/put away his laundry every time, so that he wouldn't be so messy today.

Now, if you had been in our home HALF the times we worked on this with him, until we realized we were battling the sinking Titanic, and stopped fighting with him over laundry, you would have realized how funny this was

I encouraged my kids to do well in school and to participate in activities they were interested in, but I let them choose and didn't force them to do things they no longer enjoyed. Looking back, they were not stand outs in anything, but enjoyed and grew from the various experiences. Now - as college and grad school age adults they are super involved in many things they enjoy - and many are new interests they picked up in college or beyond. I'm proud that they have the confidence to put themselves out there and continue to explore what the world has to offer. If a young person is regretting what they didn't do as a child or in HS I'm afraid they may be focused on the wrong problem.

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Anonymous wrote:I let me kids follow their interests at the time. What's the point of pushing them to do sports or music if they don't want to do it?
Your older DS needs to realize you can start a hobby at any age. Too many people have the mindset that you must master something as a 10 year old. My current hobbies (running, yoga, piano, knitting, winemaking) are all things I started as an adult.

You can start playing golf at any age but you're not going to play like someone who started playing golf at the age of ten. For some people, it is not fun to be a golf hack and it is a tough pill to swallow.

boo hoo

Right? My parents started golfing when they were in their late 20s. They have since enjoyed a lifetime of recreational golfing. Lots of people start new activities after childhood, become perfectly competent and even excel, and are probably better sports for it. If you only enjoy doing things if you're the best, that's a you problem.

There is a huge difference between "recreationl" and "competitive" golfing.  Recreation is often not very good. Some people just don't want to be average.

Yet some people are, whether or not they admit it.

Anonymous wrote:I let me kids follow their interests at the time. What's the point of pushing them to do sports or music if they don't want to do it?
Your older DS needs to realize you can start a hobby at any age. Too many people have the mindset that you must master something as a 10 year old. My current hobbies (running, yoga, piano, knitting, winemaking) are all things I started as an adult.

Same. And yeah, I'm not going to be winning national races or performing at Carnegie Hall, but that's not the point of hobbies. The older DS needs some internal motivation.

We have a really smart kid and we pushed him to be more physically and scholastically successful from an early age. And now we have a teen who has dropped behind by a grade and we learned all about residential mental health treatment centers. Wondering whether we pushed too hard is one of those burdens that keeps me up at night.

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Anonymous wrote:I let me kids follow their interests at the time. What's the point of pushing them to do sports or music if they don't want to do it?
Your older DS needs to realize you can start a hobby at any age. Too many people have the mindset that you must master something as a 10 year old. My current hobbies (running, yoga, piano, knitting, winemaking) are all things I started as an adult.

You can start playing golf at any age but you're not going to play like someone who started playing golf at the age of ten. For some people, it is not fun to be a golf hack and it is a tough pill to swallow.

boo hoo

Right? My parents started golfing when they were in their late 20s. They have since enjoyed a lifetime of recreational golfing. Lots of people start new activities after childhood, become perfectly competent and even excel, and are probably better sports for it. If you only enjoy doing things if you're the best, that's a you problem.

There is a huge difference between "recreationl" and "competitive" golfing.  Recreation is often not very good. Some people just don't want to be average.

Most people who start at 10 will still not be "competitive."