In our opinion, kids’ participation in organized sports is a great thing
as long as the focus stays primarily on the positives — character-
building, working together, staying fit, and so forth — and only
secondarily on the competition and drive to “be the best.” Playing sports
provides a wonderful arena for kids to try difficult things and gain self-
confidence from mastering new skills. While it is great that parents
encourage their kids to participate, ultimately it has to be the kids who
want to play because they enjoy the game and not because their parents
want them to be a team star. With sports as with other issues, Love and
Logic ultimately wants the kids to choose, not the parents.
A father wrote to us recently relating his experience with his son, Love
and Logic, and sports:
My son and I often had conflicts over his performance on the
sporting field. Since he was young, he has always played soccer, and
I have coached his baseball team the past three years. Last winter,
for a number of reasons, he decided to drop out of basketball
because ‘it just wasn’t his game,’ and he wanted to focus more on
his other two sports. This was hard on me, growing up in a time
when everybody playing three sports was the norm, but it seems
times have changed, so I agreed to help him work more on his
baseball and soccer skills.
Last year was especially hard. As his soccer league had
grown more competitive, he was playing less and less over the
year. We had numerous conflicts about his coach, his effort,
and whether or not he would continue the sport. I was also
trying to coach him on the way home from games and he
wanted to hear less and less of it. I felt a rift growing between
us and I didn’t know what to do about it. I wouldn’t let him
quit, but I also knew that if he didn’t want to play, it didn’t
matter what I thought, I couldn’t make him try harder — he had
to want to.
With the beginning of this new school year and fresh soccer
season, things seemed better. He had a coach who was playing