Parenting Faux Pas

I am aware that an earlier monologue was called "Parenting," but it was written a number of years ago, and with an eye toward parenting toddlers to early teens. Furthermore, I am not sure that I have added it to this collection yet. So I have full reign to say what I want about raising children.

First of all, and least important, I think my kids are and have been great. They have tested my patience, my capacity for tolerance, and my every bias and prejudice since they passed the earliest years of adolescence.

Often through these diatribes, I have tended to focus, or at least reference, the propensity for stupidity that prevails among humans. Consequently, I intend to at least touch on my and my wife's least intelligence moments or decisions.

For instance, I decided when my oldest son hit teenager-hood that I would allow him to delay his entry into the ranks of the formally employed. The deal was that he could avoid a regular job so long as he was invested in his sport - lacrosse - and his academics. Now I need to clarify that he often went to work. For instance, he served as a waiter at a catering establishment that my brother owned, commencing after his sixteenth birthday. However, he worked only sporadically, and his bills were my bills.

Why, you might ask, did I make such a decision? Well, I expected him to hit the weight room three times per week, during the school year and in the summer. I also expected his participation in summer, winter, and fall league and tournament play. I didn't know if he would be good enough to play the game in college, but he had expressed an interest in that direction, and I wanted to support the quest.

(As it turned out, he was good enough to play at the next level, but to sustain the quest after the high school opportunities expired, he would have had to reconcile himself to being a specialist, a face off guy who wouldn't be on the field throughout the action, unless he was able to make a great deal of improvement during his college career.)

The foolshness of this decision had nothing to do with the pursuit of a sports career
or anything. The stupidity was this: the work ethic that he needed to develop, the one that would have enabled him to pursue a goal of collegiate athletics, was the very one I was squelching by giving him an out. I personally played two high school sports, trained for each of them, and held down various part time jobs from thirteen years old on. While it’s true that I wasn’t on a program, and that the sports I played were not as demanding thirty years ago.
Why would I have not sent the message that the boy should find a way to work his ass off to do all of the things he wanted? True, maybe I was deluding myself that I might have been a better college athlete had I been able to devote more time to the craft. But really, I know that my limitations weren’t caused by a lack of opportunity to train and play. I simply wasn’t that good. I had/have no resentment toward my parents in that I had to follow a frenetic pace and schedule. I don’t bemoan the fact that I had to pay my own way through school. I resent my parents for a set of reasons that have nothing to do with these subjects. My point is that of course I knew better. Why didn’t I simply send the message that I had personally learned and benefitted from? Stupidity.

Oh, and by the way. Even with my bonehead decision, my kids found plenty of opportunities to develop a work ethic. The circumnavigated my errors. Isn't it great that sometimes these mistakes don't quite come back to haunt?