Before you became a parent

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The principle for me is that the children should be informed about the full extent of the decision they are making. For example, some sports require certain athletic features to reach a top level. If the child wants to do that sport, no problem, as long as they understand the probability of them reaching the top of that sport is less than other sports they turn down. There is nothing wrong with playing just at a certain level, as long as you know that. I would have been better off pursuing sports with weight classes but nobody told me this and by the time i started them (early twenties) there was just no chance i could reach beyond a certain level, which i regret.
 
Wait. Are you saying that if you can’t excel it’s not a worthy enterprise? Or am I mis-reading you?
 
My parents would have never said to me “You’ll have to have a grand piano by the time you pursue your Masters in Music, so let’s not start on this old player piano”.
 
You are misreading i’m afraid, i’m saying the child should understand any limits on the probability of them excelling. Let’s say i have a really short child who wants to play basketball. I’m not going to stop them, i’m just going to let them know that the chance they’ll ever be very good at it is pretty minimal. So if they want to pursue that sport, say at university level, then they might be better off with martial arts where height is irrelevant due to the weight classes. But ultimately if they really want basketball and don’t care about the limitation then that’s their choice.
 
stupidisasstupiddoes said:
The principle for me is that the children should be informed about the full extent of the decision they are making. For example, some sports require certain athletic features to reach a top level.
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At the lower levels or at an early age, you might not need to have that conversation.

It is true that physical features that are innate and have nothing to do with skill often become important. My daughter, for example, has huge hands and long fingers, which has served her very well with string instruments, as just being able to reach can be tough for us stubby finger people.
 
There;s a general rule of thumb that you need 10,000 hours practice to get really good at something. So if they mess around with a season of basketball, a season of hockey, a season of soccer etc then there’s an opportunity cost attached to that.
 
You don’t need to tell them. One season on the court and the tears that come with it will be enough instruction on reality. Be supportive.
We had a child in the Catholic school who took Ballet. She was very overweight, and not at all graceful,.But there she was, proudly dancing in every talent show. She enjoyed it, her parents were proud, and the other kids learned not to pre-judge and be kind. She never danced in a big company, but she did grow up with the confidence to be a News Anchor in a good sized market.
Bottom line you cannot orchestrate every little thing, every emotion, every experience because it’s all pretty much unknown. The best clarinetist I ever met became a priest and Canon lawyer.
 
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Oh gosh. 😶

Unsubscribing. Here’s hoping your baby is healthy and a real blessing in your lives. 🐤🍼
 
stupidisasstupiddoes said:
There;s a general rule of thumb that you need 10,000 hours practice to get really good at something. So if they mess around with a season of basketball, a season of hockey, a season of soccer etc then there’s an opportunity cost attached to that.
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I think that 10,000 hours is probably true at a certain level (I think it was true for me with Russian language), but kids these days have a lot of seasons to work with, especially if they start soccer at 4 and tee-ball at 6. Sometimes it is going to require some fumbling around to find a good fit. My 12-year-old was absolutely tragic at basketball when he played in 4th grade (it’s a much too dynamic game for him), so much so that we ditched the idea of team sports for him and haven’t looked back. We have him training for 10k races and doing the occasional indoor rock climbing competition. He isn’t crazy about the running, but he likes the races, and it’s good for him to be able to switch back and forth between sports to avoid injuries.
 
There just a problem whereby you can get so far in junior sports on raw athletic ability, before barriers of skill or physical limitations set in. Another way to think of it that there are more schools than there are professional jobs for virtually every sport, with the possible exception of soccer. That means that on average, even the best player in every school won’t make the elite level. Furthermore, the players that do make it cluster in certain schools anyway, so actually you could realistically be the best player for quite some distance before you realise your fundamental limits.
 
One last post:

sports are for FUN. Very few get sports scholarships or become professional athletes.
Bye y’all have fun!
 
pianistclare said:
sports are for FUN. Very few get sports scholarships or become professional athletes.

Bye y’all have fun!
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One of the earlier posts mentioned making money from music. If i had started my solo sport earlier and done less of my team sport (not drop it) then i could have made some reasonably nice money when i needed it from my solo sport (as a student). It wouldn’t be a lot of money to me now but if you look at the amount you live off when you are a student then that would have been a nice bonus!
 
stupidisasstupiddoes said:
children should be informed about the full extent of the decision they are making.
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Children’s brains are not fully formed, they are not mature, heck many adults are not fully informed about the extent of decisions they make. If kids could do that, they would not need parents. This is not Ender’s Game where 5 year olds go to Battle School.
 
pianistclare said:
One season on the court and the tears that come with it will be enough instruction on reality. Be supportive.
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Our son needed one season of T ball, even the coach said that it was clear he had no interest (DS DID find some 4 leaf clovers in the outfield!) Soccer, same thing, one season.

One of the problems is some parents what their kid to play baseball so much (or, want their child to dance in the above example) that they will pay for these “elite travel teams” where money talks more than talent or skill. Sports for kids have become so monetized.
 
Not if they just play outside the way kids have done since the beginning of time! Ride bikes until dark, come in all sweaty and with some bruised knees. I miss those smelly boys.
 
TheLittleLady said:
Our son needed one season of T ball, even the coach said that it was clear he had no interest (DS DID find some 4 leaf clovers in the outfield!) Soccer, same thing, one season.

One of the problems is some parents what their kid to play baseball so much (or, want their child to dance in the above example) that they will pay for these “elite travel teams” where money talks more than talent or skill. Sports for kids have become so monetized.
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Hilarious!

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TheLittleLady said:
Not if they just play outside the way kids have done since the beginning of time! Ride bikes until dark, come in all sweaty and with some bruised knees. I miss those smelly boys.
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I know some of the poor kids in our area do that and we have one family of middle class neighbors that does that, but they’ve had CPS called on them.

There are middle class neighborhoods that are well set up for kid freedom (I know a number of people love their cul de sacs), but in a lot of neighborhoods, there wouldn’t be any other kids doing that.

Plus, kids today often find indoor entertainment more attractive. It’s hard to peel them off their screens.

(Some editing.)
 
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What a tragedy. Kids are supposed to play. To call CPS over kids playing outside, happily here we still have normal people. (The “poor kids” thing, I hope you did not mean that the way it comes across).
 
TheLittleLady said:
What a tragedy. Kids are supposed to play. To call CPS over kids playing outside, happily here we still have normal people. (The “poor kids” thing, I hope you did not mean that the way it comes across).
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Well, to be fair, the neighbor kids were roaming all over and getting in the yard of the person who called CPS. (We have a lot of older people in the neighborhood.) There isn’t really anything that the kids can do in the neighborhood, as no other families let their kids roam like that.

There is a very distinct difference between how our poorer and more affluent city residents parent. Kids in poorer neighborhoods here obviously get a lot more freedom, walk home from school in big groups from mid-elementary school on, take small siblings to the park, etc, while more middle class kids are more heavily supervised and scheduled.

So, it’s not that no kids are out playing, it’s just that middle class parents usually don’t parent like that anymore, and that has influence on how everybody parents.

There’s a stat I’ve heard that says that today’s 12th graders have less freedom of movement than even the 8th graders of the recent past.
 
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