I agree that not all activities need to be at the top level of intensity but can be more recreational in nature. This should be driven by the level of talent and interest of each kid. Again, these things are not binary and follow a continuum.
However, it should be remembered that kids have issues with self-control, and, if they really love an activity, or are driven by more harmful reasons, they will hurt themselves. My kid is a dancer, and this is on display every day in dance. Our job is not only to encourage, but to curb when needed.
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I’m a big sports fan and, on balance, my kids had a positive experience. I do have mixed feelings about certain aspects of youth sports culture- - it can be another type of tiger parenting when taken to the extreme.
Agreed – those years are hard. Between grades 7-10, my son’s self-confidence was seriously buffeted by the parents of teammates. Their kids had gone through puberty sooner so were bigger and faster. The parents would yell at my son, make snarky remarks, and ask the coach why my son was still on the team. I am a bit embarrassed by how much satisfaction I took out of the fact that my son was the recruited college athlete who competed and excelled in college, while their kids stopped playing after high school.
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I think for us, if the level of commitment to a sport is purely for the pleasure of it, we plan the resources (time, money) accordingly. Maybe they don’t need the top level of equipment and maybe sometimes we can skip competitions to have weekends together.
Maybe my kids are made of softer stuff but I really cannot force my kids to do things they are not passionate about, even if I wanted to.
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Ugh, later puberty in boys can be so heartbreaking in our “tiger” sports environment. It was enough to cause my husband to quit his sport (he was a tiny skinny peanut of a kid with a soprano voice well into freshman year, although is now a 6’3" baritone.)
Some other countries have children’s sports figured out much better. For example Norway has its famous Children’s Rights in Sports bill which emphasizes fun and downplays competition.
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There are clearly a lot of people who would answer “yes, you are a bad person”
This is a commercial for sportswear, right? Its purpose is to sell athletic products, not suggest how to (tiger) parent children and teens.
I am not in the habit of labeling children (my own or others) as “bad” so no I would not label an intensely competitive child as bad. On the other hand, as parent I definitely describe empathy, compassion, respect, selflessness, and honesty as valuable traits, which I wish them to cultivate. Personally, I consider myself a bit of a tiger parent, but the commercial seems only tenuously connected to parenting issues and only slightly more relevant to coaching issues for the vast majority of youth athletes. Of course my kids aren’t professional athletes so their experience is mostly with coaches that aren’t sending athletes to the Olympics (though my kids have trained at some venues where some Olympians got their early start). For the most part all of their coaches (inside and outside of school) have emphasized good sportsmanship just as much as winning. Even the harshest of their coaches who may have emphasized a killer instinct (like the commercial) have also talked about sportsmanship, which the ad does not.
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Oh interesting. I wasn’t expecting this. When I saw the headline "Winning isn’t for everyone, am I a bad person? combined with the face of the child, I thought immediately about the fact that winning isn’t for everyone, that for the less talented, losing is the thing they do and the fact that in our society losers are seen as bad. In other words “I’m not a winner like these other kids that society worships. Does that make me bad?”
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I didn’t keep close count, but my guess is somewhere around half to two-thirds of what the narrator said would, if actually taken literally, support the case they were a “bad person”.
Fortunately, I don’t believe that stuff taken literally is actually necessary to be a top level competitor. I also believe a lot of athletes say similar stuff sometimes but don’t really mean it literally. It is more something like that in the context of a competition you can do things that are “bad”, but all that should be carefully limited to the boundaries of fair competition.
Indeed, I’ve seen lots of top level athletes do things like hug each other after a hard match. Are these “bad competitors”? No, they are good competitors, and also (it appears) good people. And I sure hope kids watching that stuff are getting the message that the one is not inconsistent with the other.
And I am going to go out on a limb and suggest Simone Biles may know a thing or two about being a successful competitor.
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For some reason, when I spoke about the harm inherent in the worship of competition and winning, you decided, as a counterpoint, to present this 1.5 minute Nike advertisement which, if anything, proves my point. The narration of the ad is “Buy products because we’re showing you WINNERS using our products and implying that, if you buy the products that we’re selling, you be more of a WINNER!!!”. They are only using the theme of “winner are great” in selling their overpriced crap because kids have been raised to worship WINNING.
Seriously, your argument seems to be “well, a giant corporation which makes billions off of the belief that Obsession With Winning Is Good is telling us that Obsession With Winning Is Good, doesn’t THAT convince you that Obsession With Winning Is Good?”
You can add “Obsession with winning also increases the chance that your kid with bug you to buy overpriced crap for corporations like Nike” as a reason that obsession with winning is bad.
PS. Why do you actually think that Nike is an appropriate entity to provide advice on how to raise a child?
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I did not care for this ad at all. In fact, if my kid saw this ad and then asked me to get some Nike product, I’d suggest that maybe we look at New Balance or Adidas or some other brand, because I intensely dislike many of the values that were touted in this ad.
That said, it’s all about context. Here’s the full text of the voice-over in the video, emphasis added (source):
“Am I a bad person?
Tell me. Am I?
I’m single minded.
I’m deceptive.
I’m obsessive.
I’m selfish.
Does that make me a bad person? Am I a bad person? Am I?
I have no empathy.
I don’t respect you.
I’m never satisfied.
I have an obsession with power.
I’m irrational.
I have zero remorse.
I have no sense of compassion.
I’m delusional. I’m maniacal.
You think I’m a bad person?
Tell me. Tell me. Tell me. Tell me. Am I?
I think I’m better than everyone else.
I want to take what’s yours and never give it back.
What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine.
Am I a bad person?
Tell me. Am I?
Does that make me a bad person?”
Selfish players don’t win a lot of team championships. A parent can still feel empathy or compassion for their kid even when they’re holding firm on a boundary that the kid intensely dislikes (or an athlete doing their best even though they know it’s heartbreaking for their competitor if the competitor’s losing). Lacking respect for anyone is a HUGE problem for me. HUGE. If you don’t respect your competitors, then any “win” you might get can’t be of much value. You might be the fastest runner or the highest jumper or the best vaulter, but to confuse a skill that you’re better at with being better than another person…problem!
Whether it’s because they’re naturally humble or they’ve memorized some PR-lingo, I far prefer athletes that show good sportsmanship. Those who don’t, I don’t support. And the Olympics have been filled with athletes with great sportsmanship. It obviously doesn’t require the cultivation of “bad” characteristics to become an elite athlete.
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I didn’t endorse the commercial, I merely pointed out that a lot of people would answer “yes you are a bad person”. And you just confirmed that you regard all of this sports competition and associated commercialism as irredeemably bad.
I think that’s a more reasonable reading of what I believe is a somewhat tongue-in-cheek advert, designed to grab attention. In that sense the ad agency has succeeded.
What’s interesting to me is that the whole point is to get people to immediately think (or say) “yes that’s bad” and then question their reaction because it is showing their sports idols doing that. Hopefully for most people the end result is that they understand there is nuance, and competing as hard as you can is not universally either bad or good.
The turn this thread has taken reminds me why the theater parents, music parents, debate parents, Model UN parents, etc. sometimes think that the “sports parents” are nuts.
Beethoven’s 9th requires a whole lotta talent. Even putting on a HS production of West Side Story requires a whole lotta talent. The musicians and dancers and actors and singers understand that “being the best” doesn’t mean you’re getting the solo, the lead, first violin (if you play percussion, you aren’t ever becoming first violin).
I respect HS sports for the joy it brings many participants, but once you have to parse what “selfish” means for a group of adults, it reminds me why parents of kids who participate- even at a very sophisticated level- of these other activities sometimes find the sports culture pernicious.
Carry on. I’m sure your kids are fantastic and not nasty to their competitors… but the mere existence of this ad does ask a broader question about sportsmanship, no?
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Yes it does. It plays into every negative stereotype about what it takes to “win” at sports.
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And many things that are accepted (or at least taken for granted) in sports would be labeled as “tiger parenting” if they happened in those other activities. After all that label is often applied to parents of kids in spelling bees, math competitions etc because they are treating those activities as serious competitions, similar to the way a vastly larger number of families treat sports.
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Are they fantastic athletes? Yes, Are they bad people? If the personality characteristics ascribed to them in the add are true, then yes, I’d say they are. I find it interesting that the same character traits can be used to describe many of the tech billionaires or politicians as well, and frequent opinion about them is that they are in fact bad people. Would I be happy as a parent if my child reached the pinnacle of their endeavours and exhibited the character traits of a sociopath? No.
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After reading 500 posts, I decided to ask S24 this: how did you feel when we said “Always do your best when you commit to do something” ever since you were a kid?
S24 has been good student all his life with 4.0 GPA and his ECs includes team sport, martial art and school band. He will attend UCD this fall as Engineering major.
His answer: He had no problem and agreed on trying his best on things he committed, as long as he got to interpret what his “best” was for himself. When parents asking their kids to do their “best”, they should not assume what the “best” is for their kids.
Hopefully this help.
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