D
driftersifter
Guest
By Dan Bauer
My wife left me a message at work one morning that one of my twin daughters had headed off to school and forgotten her tennis shoes at home. As a well-informed father, I knew it was tuesday and that meant Physical Education day. OK, so my wife filled me in on the second detail, I did know it was Tuesday. No shoes meant no PE class and a day of stomping around with boots and sweaty feet. Missing gym, the next best thing to recess, is a punishment, but the boots and stinky feet have the potential for fun if you are a 4th grader. As a good father, I flew home during a break and delivered the shoes to my daughters school.
It wasn't until I was headed back to work that it hit me. Bobby Knight is right. Kids haven't changed, parents have. What was I doing? By bailing out my daughter I was insuring that the same incident would happen again. A day at school without shoes and a day without PE would be appropriate consequence for forgetting. A simple lesson in responsibility would have been learned and the probability of repeating it greatly diminished. Instead the message sent was, "hey don't worry about those things, Mom and Dad will fix it." It is that message that set the stage for future confrontations when parents try to solve all of thier children's problems.
I have administered that lesson many times to the players on my team, forgotten jerseys, notebook assignments, and once I had a player forget his entire equipment bag. I am quite familiar with this concept of responsibility and consequences. At times discipline is difficult to enforce when it means a pivotal player will be taken out of the line-up. Team rules must be upheld to teach life lessonsand hopefully build character.
So why was it different when the same scenario presented itself with my child as the center-pivot? It is that well used yet logic-free statement, "I want my kids to have better than I did." That has to be a statement with roots in the 60's when the country began its moral descent. Who decided our kids needed to have it better? Probably some pot smoking liberal psychoanalyst who wrote a book telling us all how to raise our kids. It is another dose of bad advice from the "hippe" generation.
Once we stopped making kids get haircuts, take off thier hats at the table and take out the garbage, we hanged them in a bad way. When we stopped demanding that they stand for the pledge and uae Mister and Misses when addressing adults we taught them that challenging authority was more important than respecting it. We continued to make thier lives easier and easier and as a result have taught them less and less about responsibility and respect. We believe we are making thier lives even better by handing them I-pods, cell phones and new cars on thier 16th birthday.
As coaches we are disappointed that they don't have a better work ethic and take more ownership in the team. It isn't the kids we should be upset with it is the parents. Kids have always been asking for the moon, it wasn't untill the last few decades that we decided to give it to them.
In our effort to give our kids a better life, we have neglected to provide them with the greatest gifts we could possibly provide If you don't have to keep your room clean, or do the dishes or feed the dog how are you going to learn about the gifts of character, work ethic, responsibility,sacrifice and respect. Whatever happened to the axiom that if you live under my roof roof you follow my rules? Instead we let them dress like wanna-be gangsters so they can express themselves. Money and material things will never be able to replace the lessons that a life with rules and resposibilities can offer.
We often make light of those who talk reverently of the "old days". Do we even remember the times when getting in trouble at school meant twice as much trouble at home? Are the days when we used a push mower on the lawn and swearing got you a mouth full of soap forgotten? It seems more like a fairy tale than the reality that I was fortunate to expierience. There is no question in my mind that I am a better person today because of the way my parents raised me. We know the generation of heroes we produced with that style of child rearing, but seem reluctant to rekindle that lifestyle. It is because of that generation that our youth today can sit during the pledge of allegiance, flaunt more tatoos and piercings than a circus act and hide behind thier parents when trouble calls. The sacrifices that were commonplace years ago are now just stories that your grandparents tell.
Who hasn't been to McDonald's play place watching children manipulate thier parents like Geppetto? Countless requests to eat thier lunch are ignored like logic at a democratic debate. Demands might damage thier inner-child. And when the struggle is over, the lunch hits the garbage can and the youthful director celebrates with ice cream.
The self-confidence movement blindly convinced us that a childs life must be conflict free, that the journey from diapers to diplomas shoulkd be smooth, without mistakes and surely without punishment. We stopped spanking, we stopped scolding and decided to reason with them, even though they had no ability to comprehend our logic. Imaginations are out I-pods are in. And nine year olds carry around cell phones instead of baseball cards. It is a trade-off that made us feel better as parents, but left our kids with a moral void that we haven't replaced.
No one can deny that it is difficult to watch our own kids struggle. None of us want to see them fail. It is hard to watch and our first instinct is to rush in and save the day. We sometimes forget that life lessons can only be learned through personal expirience and that failure is an important part of growing up. You can't bottle childhood or put it in abook. It has to be experineced; complete with bloddy noses, hurt feelings and a day without tennis shoes.
Bobby Knight is considered by most to be Satan with a whistle. When it comes to teaching life lessons he knows it can be a bed of roses, complete with thorns of course. I'm not sure his methods will ever make a comeback, but when it comes to assigning blame for a generation of under-developed kids, Knight is right-- we have no one to blame but ourselves.
Dan Bauer is the head Hockey coach at Wausau East High School in Wisconsin.
Driftersifter
My wife left me a message at work one morning that one of my twin daughters had headed off to school and forgotten her tennis shoes at home. As a well-informed father, I knew it was tuesday and that meant Physical Education day. OK, so my wife filled me in on the second detail, I did know it was Tuesday. No shoes meant no PE class and a day of stomping around with boots and sweaty feet. Missing gym, the next best thing to recess, is a punishment, but the boots and stinky feet have the potential for fun if you are a 4th grader. As a good father, I flew home during a break and delivered the shoes to my daughters school.
It wasn't until I was headed back to work that it hit me. Bobby Knight is right. Kids haven't changed, parents have. What was I doing? By bailing out my daughter I was insuring that the same incident would happen again. A day at school without shoes and a day without PE would be appropriate consequence for forgetting. A simple lesson in responsibility would have been learned and the probability of repeating it greatly diminished. Instead the message sent was, "hey don't worry about those things, Mom and Dad will fix it." It is that message that set the stage for future confrontations when parents try to solve all of thier children's problems.
I have administered that lesson many times to the players on my team, forgotten jerseys, notebook assignments, and once I had a player forget his entire equipment bag. I am quite familiar with this concept of responsibility and consequences. At times discipline is difficult to enforce when it means a pivotal player will be taken out of the line-up. Team rules must be upheld to teach life lessonsand hopefully build character.
So why was it different when the same scenario presented itself with my child as the center-pivot? It is that well used yet logic-free statement, "I want my kids to have better than I did." That has to be a statement with roots in the 60's when the country began its moral descent. Who decided our kids needed to have it better? Probably some pot smoking liberal psychoanalyst who wrote a book telling us all how to raise our kids. It is another dose of bad advice from the "hippe" generation.
Once we stopped making kids get haircuts, take off thier hats at the table and take out the garbage, we hanged them in a bad way. When we stopped demanding that they stand for the pledge and uae Mister and Misses when addressing adults we taught them that challenging authority was more important than respecting it. We continued to make thier lives easier and easier and as a result have taught them less and less about responsibility and respect. We believe we are making thier lives even better by handing them I-pods, cell phones and new cars on thier 16th birthday.
As coaches we are disappointed that they don't have a better work ethic and take more ownership in the team. It isn't the kids we should be upset with it is the parents. Kids have always been asking for the moon, it wasn't untill the last few decades that we decided to give it to them.
In our effort to give our kids a better life, we have neglected to provide them with the greatest gifts we could possibly provide If you don't have to keep your room clean, or do the dishes or feed the dog how are you going to learn about the gifts of character, work ethic, responsibility,sacrifice and respect. Whatever happened to the axiom that if you live under my roof roof you follow my rules? Instead we let them dress like wanna-be gangsters so they can express themselves. Money and material things will never be able to replace the lessons that a life with rules and resposibilities can offer.
We often make light of those who talk reverently of the "old days". Do we even remember the times when getting in trouble at school meant twice as much trouble at home? Are the days when we used a push mower on the lawn and swearing got you a mouth full of soap forgotten? It seems more like a fairy tale than the reality that I was fortunate to expierience. There is no question in my mind that I am a better person today because of the way my parents raised me. We know the generation of heroes we produced with that style of child rearing, but seem reluctant to rekindle that lifestyle. It is because of that generation that our youth today can sit during the pledge of allegiance, flaunt more tatoos and piercings than a circus act and hide behind thier parents when trouble calls. The sacrifices that were commonplace years ago are now just stories that your grandparents tell.
Who hasn't been to McDonald's play place watching children manipulate thier parents like Geppetto? Countless requests to eat thier lunch are ignored like logic at a democratic debate. Demands might damage thier inner-child. And when the struggle is over, the lunch hits the garbage can and the youthful director celebrates with ice cream.
The self-confidence movement blindly convinced us that a childs life must be conflict free, that the journey from diapers to diplomas shoulkd be smooth, without mistakes and surely without punishment. We stopped spanking, we stopped scolding and decided to reason with them, even though they had no ability to comprehend our logic. Imaginations are out I-pods are in. And nine year olds carry around cell phones instead of baseball cards. It is a trade-off that made us feel better as parents, but left our kids with a moral void that we haven't replaced.
No one can deny that it is difficult to watch our own kids struggle. None of us want to see them fail. It is hard to watch and our first instinct is to rush in and save the day. We sometimes forget that life lessons can only be learned through personal expirience and that failure is an important part of growing up. You can't bottle childhood or put it in abook. It has to be experineced; complete with bloddy noses, hurt feelings and a day without tennis shoes.
Bobby Knight is considered by most to be Satan with a whistle. When it comes to teaching life lessons he knows it can be a bed of roses, complete with thorns of course. I'm not sure his methods will ever make a comeback, but when it comes to assigning blame for a generation of under-developed kids, Knight is right-- we have no one to blame but ourselves.
Dan Bauer is the head Hockey coach at Wausau East High School in Wisconsin.
Driftersifter
