CoachVinnie
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A Nation of Wimps - 2008/04/28 16:58
A new book from Hara Marano, A Nation of Wimps, discusses the "High Cost of Invasive Parenting." While much of her discussion centers upon the culture of high pressure academic achievement, the flaunting of child success and the "business" of child rearing, sports performance is an unavoidable part. None of the points being made here about sports are new to the audience of this website, but its worth noting that the pervasiveness of high strung parents continues to grow far and wide.
An excerpt from Chapter 1:
There's abundant evidence that parental obsessiveness has reached the point of abuse. It's most obvious in children pushed to achieve their best in athletics; their pain typically declares itself in a frank, physical way that can prevent them from functioning at all and can even derail future development. Across the country, orthopedic surgeons and sports doctors report skyrocketing rates of overuse injuries in kids as young as eight- the kind that until a few years ago were seen only in adult athletes after years of playing professionally.
In an unfortunately disturbing quote from "Reebok's senior director of grassroots marketing," commerce is complicit in the pushing of children to the point of abuse:
We're going to find them, expose them and get them used to the grind at an earlier age. I believe in that theory.
I encourage reading this literature. As former editor of Psychology Today, Marano does a great job of addressing a disturbing trend that threatens to undermine the development of our nation's youth, and ultimately our future as a society. It obviously affects us as coaches, but there's clearly more at stake here in the broader scheme of things.
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