Is life supposed to be this busy? Is it just a fact that insanity follows young children or is it more self imposed because we are just doing what everyone else is? This is the question Trey and I have been debating lately.
I played tons of sports growing up and so did Trey. I always assumed my kids would do the same. But as I cheered on my Reesie at a soccer game today and watched the other team's coach scream at their kids with the goal of beating the tar out of our girls, I found myself asking, "what in the heck are we doing here?". I'm all about teaching her to work with others, take instructions from others and for her to develop new skills, but should I expose her to the ridiculousness of other adults' behavior yet? Should we give up traveling on the weekends and doing family oriented activities to do this? I'm leaning towards HECK NO at this point.
I find that I'm such a different parent than I had imagined I'd be. Rather than wanting to expose my kids to all kinds of sports, I want to expose them to all kinds of character building experiences. Rather than wanting to run all over the place to enroll my kids in a gagillion different activities, I'd rather hang out together and focus on helping them find where their gifts lie and then go with the "less is more" approach. I want to look back someday and know that I spent as much time with them as possible (and not in a car while being the exhausted family taxi driver), guiding them towards having a purpose on this Earth, rather than teaching them to be a part of the rat race. Plus I've never been one who cares about doing what society dictates and I don't think I'll start now.
The older I get, the tougher choices become. Life use to be more black and white. I had many answers. Now, there's a lot of gray. I told this once to someone and their response was this, "I believe that's called....maturity."
I couldn't agree more.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone
Saturday, October 15, 2011
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1 comment:
Great post! I agree! Of course, I have a kid who has interests in everything under the sun and we have tried really hard to par down the activities so we can have down time as a family. Also, I think the competitive sports at the pre-school age is bizarre. I also think it is a southern thing where sports has much more focus. The kids in our area don't begin competitive games until 1st grade. Before that age there are sports programs during the week that teach just fundamentals.
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