Youth sports creates a complicated family dynamic, no matter how hard the parents try to maintain perspective and reassure the child they can quit anytime.
On the Soccer Dad-Pod, I tell host JB Anderson,
“I took pride in the fact that I would tell [Scout], even when she was a freshman or a sophomore in college, ‘You know, you don’t have to do this. We saved money for you to go to college. If you decide this is bullshit, and you want to skip this and just be a regular college student, you can do that.' And I would say that and I kind of took pride in saying that. Until I realized, you’re asking someone to give up something that makes them special. This has made her special for the last 17 years. … It’s easy for me to say, ‘We don’t care if you become a great soccer player or not.' But we still talk to her 95 percent of the time about her soccer.
We don’t go to Athens, Ohio, drive seven hours, to ask her math teacher a question. We’ve demonstrated that this is the thing that gets us all excited, and we’re all complicit in this."
Parents, how do you try to let your kid know this is their journey, not yours? (Even though you're doing all the driving.)
