Chapter 11

Benched

Sadly, overzealous mums and dads don’t give up easily. If they can’t get an edge for their kid through academia, they’ll try for one through sports.

They’re not alone.

I did sports. My family did sports. My friends did sports. My enemies did, too. There are more of them, so that’s a better sample size. In fact, I don’t know a single person who’s never done a sport. We all thought it was a good idea.

And we were all wrong.

There’s nothing more dangerous than youth sports. I don’t mean for your kid. Concussions and broken bones might smart a bit, but that’s life. Walk it off, buttercup.

The real danger sports pose is to you, the parent on the sideline. Kids will only damage their bodies and minds. You could lose your immortal soul. When you see your child out there on the field, you’ll be tempted to relive your own failed dreams of athletic glory. Don’t. Down that road lies effort, and that’s the path to the dark side.

To be a bare minimum parent, you must resist the urge to care about sports. Indifference is stronger than love or even the Force. Let your kid join a team if they really want to, but don’t encourage them too much. Buy them the required equipment. Pick them up and drop them off. Clap. But the second you switch from passive supporter to diehard fan, you become a sports parent. Enjoy your red lightsaber.

The competitive pull of youth sports is hard to resist. Deep down, we all have a primal urge to see our child do better than other people’s kids. It’s the ultimate secondhand validation. If your kid wins, that means you’re better than those other parents, or at least that you passed on better genes. Whatever it was, your kid triumphed because of you. Brag about it to everyone you know. That never gets old.

It sounds absurd, but otherwise rational people consistently slip into this mind-set when the starting whistle blows. Look around at any sporting event. You might be happy your kid finally kicked the ball in the right direction, but next to you there’s probably another parent screaming for their four-year-old to do a slide tackle. Spoiler alert: Toddlers don’t care if they make it to the World Cup. Their only goal is to make it to their halftime juice box.

Few people realize when they cross the line between reasonable human being and sports parent, mostly because they’re too busy shouting their heads off about something on the field. The first sign things have gone awry is you think yelling makes a difference. High-decibel parenting won’t turn your child into a professional athlete. Neither will screaming at the ref for failing to recognize your child is the second coming of Jesus. The son of God was a great religious figure and an even better goalkeeper. Jesus saves.

Shouting at the top of your lungs isn’t even the right way to express your displeasure with a sports official. If someone makes a decision you don’t like, here are the proper steps to have a go at them:

1. Don’t.

It’s really that simple. No football player has ever made it into the Premier League and said, “I wouldn’t be here if my mum didn’t make that under-12s ref cry.” Professional players would never resort to something so dishonorable. They stick to steroids.

What Sports Parents Yell at Refs vs. What They Mean

What They Say	What They Mean
You suck!	Why am I like this?
Are you blind?!	I shudder when I see myself in the mirror.
Let’s take this outside!	I’ve never satisfied anyone in the bedroom.
What game are you watching?!	I hope it’s not the one where I’m making a jackass of myself.
Did the other team pay you?!	I hope so, because you don’t make enough money to put up with this kind of verbal abuse.
My kid was robbed!	Of a decent childhood by my behavior today.

Reach for the Stars

If you can’t shout your kid to greatness, how will they reach the big leagues?

Here’s a dirty little secret: They won’t. Your kid isn’t going to make it in the Premier League. Or in the First Division, Second Division, or even the pub team for that matter. Your child won’t make the NBA or play at Wimbledon, either. In fact, toss together any sports-related term you want. Your kid won’t make the cut. Not even in curling.

Don’t get mad at me. I did you a favor. Your kid was going to get rejected anyway, but only after you wasted your money and their childhood in a vain attempt to turn them into the superhuman athlete you always wanted to be. It’s more economical to have your vicarious sports dreams crushed by my excellent-value book. I might not have all the answers, but I can give you disappointment at a discount.

There’s nothing wrong with not achieving greatness at sports—or greatness at anything else, for that matter. As I’ve made clear from the beginning, we’re all headed for mediocrity. Some people just waste time and effort struggling against the inevitable. Spare your kid years of heartbreak and let them be average from the get-go. All those extra coaching sessions are leading right back to the middle with the rest of us.

But how can I be certain of your child’s destiny with ordinariness? For starters, you’re reading this chapter.

Truly committed sports parents don’t need a guide. They already know how to hit it big. They would have made it themselves had they not been sidetracked by some unfair circumstance—a vindictive coach, an untimely injury, or a total lack of any athletic ability whatsoever. That last one is what got me. It’s weird how a lifetime of being bad at everything can sneak up on you.

But while sports parents know everything there is to know about succeeding as an athlete, none of them agree on how to pull it off. There’s more than one way to ruin a childhood. To sports parents, steamrolling their child’s youth will be worth it when their kid hoists whatever arbitrary medal or trophy now defines that kid’s entire existence. Ultimately, sports parents just want their kid to have fun—as long as they win or die trying.

There are three unreasonable goals a sports parent uses to wreck their child’s life: the Olympics, professional sports, and local athletics. As a bare minimum parent, you’ll be surrounded by mums and dads madly chasing these misguided dreams. If you’re not careful, you’ll get infected, too—if you aren’t already. If you ever see your kid make a great play and think, “With a little additional training, they could go far,” leave the premises immediately. Then sit your kid in front of the TV. It could take months or years of inaction to save them.

The Easy Way Out

You probably have some doubts right now. At first glance, it seems like the lazy—and thus right—thing to do would be to let your kid excel at sports on their own, then freeload off their success. Isn’t that what bare minimum parenting is all about?

Sadly, that shortcut doesn’t exist. You might as well declare you’re going to save time on your commute by riding on a unicorn. That’s obviously impossible because (1) unicorns don’t exist, and (2) if they did, it would be too hard to attach a license plate. Good luck finding a screw hole.

The naturally gifted child athlete is just as fictional as that unicorn. Every kid starts at the same basic athletic level, with slight variations. Children who are a hair better or older than average tempt their parents into giving them more attention, and so begins the slide down the slippery slope to extra training. Gradually, the normal kids with normal skill levels drift out of sports and lead normal, productive lives. But the kids who showed a mild aptitude and got extra coaching from their parents have to endure years of exhausting, thankless toil before they crash and burn their way out of sports altogether. Those tragic “Where are they now?” documentaries have to come from somewhere.

And, yes, crashing and burning is inevitable. I understand your kid is special, but they’re competing against millions of other equally special kids in a race to see who can waste their youth the fastest. When it comes to sports, it really doesn’t matter if your child finishes first or last; everyone is a loser.

You no doubt have dozens of counterarguments right now. Nice try. This is a book, not a dialogue. Instead, here’s an in-depth look at the Olympics, professional sports, and local athletics to explain why I’m right.

Professional Amateurs

For sports parents who want to turn their kid into a worldwide superstar as quickly as possible, the Olympics are a tempting option. They generally have lower age limits, which is great if you want to put the pressure of international competition on a kid who can’t even think about driving lessons without having a panic attack. The Olympics are also the fastest path to the back of a cereal box. There’s no higher honor than to have your picture awkwardly stare at people while they eat their breakfast.

Too bad that dream is already out of reach. If you’re reading this and your child is older than a fetus, it’s too late for them to qualify for the Olympics. Parents of top gymnasts and swimmers enroll their kids in Soviet-style sports gulags the second they leave the womb. Athletes, like Jedi, start their training young. If your toddler doesn’t already have their own strength and conditioning coach, they’ll never win a gold medal or blow up a Death Star.

Sure, Olympic personnel don’t call their training facilities sports gulags, but only because communist punishment methods scare away sponsors. To avoid negative publicity, sports parents use words like “camp” or “homeschool.” The latter is technically true. Training for the Olympics for sixteen hours a day counts as an education because the kids learn valuable life lessons, like win or you don’t eat. Hunger is an excellent teacher.

The bottom line is kids don’t just roll out of bed and pull off world-record swimming times or gymnastics scores. Instead, they give up their entire childhoods to achieve greatness at those arbitrary scoring metrics. As opposed to normal childhoods, which are dedicated to different but equally arbitrary scoring metrics. Those multiple-choice tests won’t fill out themselves.

Even if the impossible happens and your child takes home the gold, it won’t be worth it. A typical winner snaps up a few short-term endorsement deals that peter out before the next Olympics. You can’t expect the public to remember who your child is for a full four years. This is the Age of the Internet, when fifteen minutes of fame have been reduced to 280 characters. The best your child can hope for is to live on forever in an insulting Olympic meme. It’s our version of the pyramids.

A former Olympic athlete’s best option is to snag a job as a coach or commentator. Otherwise their skills will become useless as soon as the Olympics end. When else will a world record in the fifty-meter butterfly come in handy? “That guy is drowning! Quick, somebody cross that short body of water in the least efficient way possible!” I’ll wait for a boat.

Keep in mind that the past-their-prime child athletes I’m describing here are the “successes.” There are only three medals in each event. For every other Olympic athlete around the world who didn’t stand on the podium, the years they spent in the sport were a total bust. All they have to show for giving up their childhoods are lingering injuries and the faint echo of the pity clap. The worst part is many of them are too young to drink, so they have to deal with their failure sober.

Still, people who go to the Olympics and fail on the world’s largest stage are lucky compared to the people who don’t make the team. For every gymnast who qualifies for the final squad, there are dozens more who put in the same hours and didn’t even get to be an alternate. Don’t be jealous your kid isn’t an Olympic gold medalist; be grateful they aren’t an Olympic near miss.

If you’re a bare minimum parent, you shouldn’t touch Olympic training with a ten-foot pole. Unless you use that pole to pull your kid out of the training pool. If they swim like me, they could use the help.

So what should you do if your child says they want to be an Olympic athlete? Here’s a sample conversation:

KID: I want to be an Olympic swimmer.
PARENT: No.

Then buy them ice cream. Ice cream fixes everything. Note: This also works on adults.

Pros and Cons of Olympic Sports

Sport	Pro	Con
Snowboarding	Will get your kid outside in the winter.	As soon as you put on all their snow gear, they’ll need to go to the bathroom.
Sprinting	Will build up your kid’s cardio.	You’ll never catch them when they’re in trouble.
Swimming	Trains your kid not to drown.	You might have to fight off frisky dolphins.
Decathlon	Favors kids who are mediocre at many things rather than great at one.	Gives your kid ten times the opportunities for failure with only one medal at stake.
Pole Vault	It’s fun to fly through the air.	Practices will turn into jousting matches.
Discus	Makes your kid strong.	Is basically a deadly game of Frisbee.
Cycling	Your kid rides a bike anyway.	Tight shorts eliminate the possibility of future grandchildren.
Javelin	Teaches your kid to throw sharp objects.	No.

Going Pro

The Olympics have one downside even sports parents recognize: They only pay off once every four years. Mums and dads who want to scrounge off their kid more consistently steer them toward professional sports. Unlike the Olympics, which shroud the selfish pursuit of individual glory in a thin veneer of patriotism, professional sports are only about earning cold, hard cash. I don’t mean literally, of course. Unless you live in Greenland or Canada, where your child could very well be paid with a wad of frozen bills.

Professional sports certainly seem tempting on the surface. They generate the kind of money that could let your kid support you for the rest of forever. A little effort training your kid up front is okay if it lets you retire twenty years early, right?

Wrong. Maybe you should stop answering my rhetorical questions.

Let’s look at the best-case scenario. If by some miracle your overparenting lands your child in professional sports, your kid will be thrown to the wolves—metaphorically for now, but maybe literally in the future. Formula One is always looking for ways to make roaring round in circles more exciting.

Think about all the bad decisions you’ve made in your own life with an ordinary income and no fame whatsoever. Now multiply that by 10,000. That’s what your child will be up against. And, no, you won’t be able to help them. You’re the one who got them into this mess in the first place. Save your tips for when they want to ruin your grandchildren.

Too bad your kid has zero chance of faring well at the professional-sports lifestyle on their own. Take someone in their late teens or early twenties and give them unlimited sex and money. Then put them on national TV any given weekend. It sounds like a twisted social experiment, not a viable career path.

Your kid will wreck their life in record time, but they won’t be entirely to blame. You’ll be right there with them, encouraging questionable choices that directly benefit you. After all, you gave up so much to force your kid to fulfill your dreams for you. It’s only fair that they repay you with a new house and a holiday house and a holiday house from the holiday house for when the other two houses are being cleaned. If your kid really loved you, they could afford all those things. Maybe they should play better.

Money problems are tough, but they won’t kill your child. Match days will take care of that. If your kid is an American football or rugby player, they’ll destroy their body day in and day out to make the rich guy who owns the whole operation slightly richer. It’s like being a coal miner, but with longer hours and tighter shorts.

American football or rugby’s power to destroy athletes isn’t unique. It’s just the best reported. Until recently, no one knew about the hidden dangers of concussions. Similar chronic health threats likely lurk beneath the surface of other sports. Rest assured some researcher will eventually prove light jogging causes cancer and tennis makes your genitals explode. I don’t know, I’m not a doctor. But whatever your kid is doing now that you think makes them healthier, you can bet someone later on will prove it’s actually killing them. Staying out of sports altogether is the safest play. Laziness is the first step toward immortality.

Professional sports will leave your child financially broke and physically broken, but things can still get worse. Whatever is left of your child’s traumatized brain will still understand the intense, unrelenting criticism from fans and the press. Every failure will be replayed dozens of times on a giant stadium screen and on millions of TVs around the world. No pressure.

For Olympic athletes, the press takes it easy. Yes, that gymnast failed at their big jump, but they’re just a kid and have a bright future ahead of them. But if a professional athlete drops a ball, they’ve committed an unforgivable crime.

As a society, we’ve agreed that getting a ball across a line or into a net is the apex of human achievement. If the world placed as much emphasis on science and medicine as it does on sports, we’d have a cure for exploding genital syndrome. Until that day, I’ll keep wearing my awareness ribbon.

As a bare minimum parent, you know that pushing your kid toward professional sports is a mistake. Even if they succeed as a paid athlete, they’ll fail at life. At least they can’t blame you for your role in it. After the first few tackles, they won’t remember who you are.

Pros and Cons of Professional Sports

Sport	Pro	Con
Rugby	It’s one hell of a ride.	It’ll be in a wheelchair.
Football	It has more games in a season than any other sport.	You’ll work so many days, you might as well get a regular job.
Basketball	It’s always indoors.	You must be tall enough to hit your head on everything.
Horse Racing	Horses do all the work.	Horses can’t pay gambling debts.
Ice Hockey	It’s fast and fluid.	If it’s too fluid, players will drown.
Mixed Martial Arts	It’s exciting.	Sibling fights just got a lot more deadly.
Motor Racing	You compete sitting down.	It’s just a three-hour car trip with no toilet breaks.

Keep It Local

But what about local sports? If your aspirations for your child begin and end in a youth league, there must be some benefit to them. That’s why people play them, right?

Nope.

People play sports because everybody else plays sports. And everybody else plays sports because nobody learned their lesson from the people before them. The one thing kids should learn—to quit before they start—is the one sports will never teach them.

Instead, organized sports teach your child to buy into the weird authoritarian relationship that only exists between a sports man or woman and a coach. “Follow orders so you get more playing time” might not be the lesson you want your kid to learn, unless you hope they’ll grow up to be a stormtrooper. Some kids look good in white.

Sports also teach your kid they have no right to their own time. Without consulting you or your child, coaches and athletic directors schedule mandatory practices and games that your kid must attend—or else. Good luck keeping your child on the team if they pull a sickie. They have to be there every second of every practice and game to earn the privilege of continuing to be there for every second of every practice and game. Are we having fun yet?

And woe is your kid if they get hurt. At a real job, if your child gets injured, they get to stay home on paid leave. But in sports, your kid will go to the away games anyway. Coaches say they’re teaching kids to support the team, but what they’re really doing is showing them there’s no escape. Even the military doesn’t work that way. When a soldier gets wounded, nobody sends them back to the front lines to clap for the other troops.

As for the social benefits of sports, your child doesn’t need teammates to make friends. Most squads have ten or twelve kids. Without them, your child could befriend a few of the other seven billion people on earth. My kids can’t walk from the slide to the monkey bars without making sixteen new friends. Thank goodness that ability fades with age. That much human contact would kill me.

If the only way your child can make friends is through sports, they have bigger problems than the next home game. Most sports careers are finished by the end of secondary school. Your kid has a rough adulthood ahead of them if they can only connect with people by playing with a ball or running in big circles. From a social standpoint, they’re basically just a golden retriever. Teach them to sit.

Total Commitment

“So what if sports have no benefit?” you say to yourself, since you’re talking to a book with no ears. “My kid loves them.”

And they do—for a while. At first, kids love sports because they’re fun. Then they love them because they’re good at them. And finally they love them because if they admit they don’t, you’ll murder them. After you spend a month’s salary on tennis camp, your child is pretty much locked into the sport for life.

What youth sports really teach kids is to stick with something they hate because their own goals aren’t as important as other people’s. What you wanted was a well-rounded human being, but what you got was a martyr. Expect that to come up down the road six eggnogs into Christmas.

Every kid follows this sports arc from enthusiasm to self-loathing, so it’s no use warning them. Your child will still join a team. If there’s one thing kids love, it’s being peer-pressured into bad decisions.

The best way to stop your kid from doing sports is to do nothing to stop them. Don’t ban them, but don’t help them or push them harder. Just give them nominal support until they lose interest and fail on their own. The worst possible thing you can do is force them to stick with it just because you’ve already wasted a lot of money. It’s always better to cut your losses than to throw good money after bad. Support your kid’s decision to quit while staying vague about your real feelings. Save the champagne for after they go to bed. If your child fails as an athlete, you’ve succeeded as a parent.

If, on the other hand, you actively stop your kid from participating, you’ll be vilified for the rest of your life. The world is full of would-be strikers who were one unsigned permission slip away from a World Cup Final. Fortunately, there’s no reason to crush your child’s dreams. Life will do that for them.

Bulletin Board Material

By not pushing your kid in sports, you’ll be better positioned to hit the benchmarks for successful parenting. Your kid will have free time to get a job since they won’t be wasting hours a night on practices and games that cost you money. They won’t be pushed toward social deviance by a sports culture that values physical prowess over being a decent human being. And they won’t blame you for their problems since you’ll empower them to escape sports, the biggest problem of all. Congratulations, you have a functional human being on your hands. Now you can both be out of shape together.

If you’re a sports parent, don’t take all this as a personal attack on you. I’m not here to destroy your life. You’re doing a good enough job of that on your own. I’m merely trying to give you the greatest gift one parent can bestow upon another: your weekends back.

If that doesn’t make you feel better, don’t bother sending me hate mail. If you want to become a true bare minimum parent, you need to stop caring what other people say, including me. Use what advice you can and ignore the rest. Unless you ignore the advice in that sentence, too. Then I can’t help you.

It’s never too late to care less. Even if your kid is mid-season, you can always just stop showing up. This doesn’t just apply to sports. When you don’t show up for their extracurriculars, everybody wins. Especially you.