Remember: Some moms make athletes, Sh*tty Moms make fans. Somebody’s got to yell at the TV on Super Bowl Sunday.
Like whooping cough, organized sports are highly contagious. You can vaccinate against them by not signing up the two-year-old for soccer classes. (If we can agree that the two-year-old at soccer practice is a two-year-old running on a field, then we can agree that the same thing can be accomplished by driving the two-year-old to any old field, and at your convenience.)
Eventually, your kids will come in contact with other kids who swim, run, or play base/foot/soft/basketball. And they’ll want to join the team, too.
Uniforms. Equipment. Early mornings. Other parents. Goddamnit.
Look, you can’t completely slack off on extracurricular activities. Remember, you’re not just raising a child, you’re raising a person who may one day be granted power of attorney over your finances.
You need her to have a few fond memories of her childhood.
But beware of organized sports: The governing bodies will seduce your young child with colorful participant ribbons and shiny competitor trophies. Before long, your daughter will be obsessed. There are only three possible outcomes to this scenario and they’re all horrible.
YOUR KID IS NOT A TALENTED ATHLETE.
Sucking feels shitty, and at some point, your kid will want to quit. At this point, you’ll have to decide which coffee mug platitude to teach: the John Wooden standby, “Quitters never win and winners never quit,” or the easier to implement “Cut your losses.” Try to conceal your ecstasy that the eight A.M. T-ball games may be coming to an end.
YOUR KID IS AN AVERAGE ATHLETE.
She gets third place just enough times to make her think first place is within reach. If this keeps up into her teenage years, you’ll be putting in the same hours and expenses as an Olympian’s mom, but with no scholarship to make it all worthwhile. For every “Michael Phelps’s Mom” there are a hundred “For Ten Years, I Sat on the Bleachers Next to Michael Phelps’s Mom” moms.
YOUR KID IS AN EXCEPTIONAL ATHLETE.
Even worse, your kid could be talented. That’s the end of family dinners and summer vacations. Casually mention your family’s trip to the Grand Canyon at a swim meet, and two hours later the swim coach is at your house, wild-eyed. The league championships are held over Labor Day weekend, and your daughter is the backstroke leg of the medley relay.
At the high school level, committing to a time-intensive sport doesn’t allow your teenager to have a normal childhood. Three-or four-hour workouts each day means that she’ll miss out on classic American experiences like getting a job at McDonald’s, getting high before going to the job at McDonald’s, and getting fired for being high while on the job at McDonald’s.
MAKING ATHLETES THE MICHAEL LANDON WAY.
The Loneliest Runner was a semiautobiographical 1970s made-for-TV movie written by Michael Landon about a teenage boy who was a chronic bed wetter. To shame him into stopping, his mother would hang his pee-stained sheets outside the window. Every day, the boy would run home to yank the sheets down before any of his friends saw them. Eventually, these daily peesheet wind sprints led to the boy becoming a track star and an Olympic gold medalist.
Is it true? No. But just because it’s fiction doesn’t mean that, in our overstructured era, you can’t long for the days when terrible parenting created a great athlete.
Remember: Some moms make athletes, Sh*tty Moms make fans. Somebody’s got to yell at the TV on Super Bowl Sunday.