Classy vs. Crass
I’m not looking forward to parenting my kids through the high school years. From what I can tell, being a teenager gets more complicated with each generation.
I assumed that team sports might give them a healthy outlet for competitive impulses and also provide a constructive way to spend huge chunks of teen time. In other words, perhaps it will spare them from getting tangled up in those silly, brainless activities that get hatched when someone has too much time and too little supervision.
A good kid, in fact, might find a launching pad for greatness because of sports. He will make those around him better; he will learn a life lesson in being gracious in victory and defeat.
Then again, high school sports can also give adolescents the exact wrong kind of outlet.
I read about examples of both this week.
First, I was puffed up with co-blogger pride when I read about Peter Robinson's son. In the Member Feed, Duane Oyen shared a newspaper article on the football talent of young Pedro. Duane also included a YouTube video of Pedro’s EENER Sports Player of the Week interview.
Like his dad, young Pedro is a class act—gracious in victory, quick to deflect praise to others, cheerful but not ecstatic, and eloquent but not hoity-toity.
But then there was this story today in my local newspaper, the New Canaan Advertiser. New Canaan High School plays neighboring Darien High each Thanksgiving in a friendly yet spirited football game. New Canaan has won this contest for the past six years. However, Darien enters tomorrow's game with a 10-0 record. Spirits are especially high, and the rivalry has boiled over in an unfortunate way.
According to police reports, a handful of Darien football players snuck onto the New Canaan High School campus around midnight last night and spray-painted the team motto in several key locations. The largest single piece of vandalism was a large D painted over a walkway of memorial bricks.
The cost of damages is “sizable.”
"You are going to have to factor in man hours of cleanup but you are also going to have to look at what can’t be cleaned up and would have to be replaced,” said Assistant NCHS Principal Ari Rothman. “…The paint that was used was an oil-based paint and, as I understand, it was particularly heavy duty. There was deliberate maliciousness in using that type of paint. Any type of paint is wrong, but by using that type of paint it indicated a real desire to damage property and to cost us money.”
Harmless prank? Perhaps, but it seems a step beyond the knocking-down-of-the-goal-posts or stealing-the-stuffed-mascot hijinks that have always given these kinds of high school rivalries spice. This reeks of a deep disregard for others – the people who will clean up the mess, the players who will have to play the biggest game of the year without their teammates, and the parents who (perhaps, perhaps not) tried their very best to raise these young kids right.
Peter, how’d you do it?
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Comments :
May '10
Re: Classy vs. Crass
Ursula, I think you will find a surprisingly sizable contingent of parents who say "oh, boys will be boys." Here in the next town that is a common attitude toward vandalism. What has worked for us is to help our daughter find her passion, and do all we can to support her in pursuing it. For some kids it's sports, for others it's dance, for others it's the math team or the science fair. There are all kinds of kids and all kinds of passions. Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours!
Re: Classy vs. Crass
How'd I do it? I stayed out of the way and let his mom do it. That's the plain truth. I wasn't particularly athletic in high school myself--although elected "Class Actor," I managed to spend several years in track and soccer without winning a single trophy, ribbon or honorable mention. My wife, by contrast, grew up in a family that appreciated sports--and, with three boys to raise, she understood very early that sports could represent a useful outlet for their energies. As it has. And now I have go pick up one boy from football practice and another from basketball practice. Happy Thanksgiving, Ursuala!
May '10
Re: Classy vs. Crass
A dowry of $100,000 to the Robinson family if Pedro accepts my daughter's hand in marriage. What an impressive kid.
May '10
Re: Classy vs. Crass
In the interests of full disclosure, hat-tip to Uncle Don, who provided the link.
Sep '10
Re: Classy vs. Crass
I have 3 sports playing boys, but must I remind all you fellow conservatives of Russell Kirk's railing against the corruption of college life by an overenthusiastic pursuit of sports?
May '10
Re: Classy vs. Crass
Can I take this opportunity to say how much I hate, hate, HATE that "o yeah, I'm great, I'm cool, I rule" dance-in-endzone culture that has metastasized since Jerry Maquire?
Sep '10
Re: Classy vs. Crass
I agree with you. It drives me crazy.
May '10
Re: Classy vs. Crass
Competitive athletics is great if your children are so inclined. not all children are.
For boys I highly commend Boy Scouts to your attention.
Search Institute has developed a list of 40 assets http://www.search-institute.org/content/40-developmental-assets-adolescents-ages-12-18 long story short, the more assets a young person posesses, the more likely they are to grow up to be functional citizens, the less likely they are to grow up to be sociopaths.
Outside of the family nothing (not sports, not school, not church youth group) either directly provides, or directly influences or encourages, more of these assets than Boy Scouting.
Only a few kids can make the team. Only one kid can be the captain. Every boy can be an Eagle Scout if he does the work. In Scouting you make your own game. The skills acquired as a Scout are useful life-long.
[Girl Scouts, not familiar with the program]
Nov '10
Re: Classy vs. Crass
I gather that Girl Scouts is markedly inferior to Boy Scouts. For girls, may I recommend a program called Girls on the Run?
GOTR seems to combine some of the positive attributes of Boy Scouts with some of the advantages of a sports team. Research suggests that participation in organized sports protects young girls from a host of ills, but not all girls are inclined to team sports. GOTR creates a team setting in which girls of different athletic abilities can participate in running, a sport that they may be able to continue through their lifetimes.
Some conservatives might object to the noncompetitive nature of the program, but I’d counter with my own non-PC opinion that girls are different from boys and that competitive athletics come more naturally to boys than to girls. My lovely daughter has no interest in a soccer team, but I’m hoping she’s developing lifelong habits of fitness through her participation in GOTR. Conservatives might also criticize the emphasis the program places on self esteem. I get that, but I think for girls of this age it's a necessary antidote to society's pressure to be beautiful and thin.
Aug '10
Re: Classy vs. Crass
I haven't noticed Girl Scouting being so much inferior to Boy Scouting. True, where I lived, more families participated in Boy Scouts and their programs were better funded -- and this may be a nationwide phenomenon -- but once I finally convinced my family to let me be a Girl Scout, it was pretty cool. In that wholesome, dorky way.
As for running, some people love it. But not everyone can love running. (For example, running for a prolonged time bores me. I'd rather hike, bike, ski cross-country, swim, dance, canoe -- anything else, pretty much, besides run more than a sprint.)
As girls are less competitive than boys, dance can be a good choice, as the end-product is an artistic work rather than winning. I suppose in some circles, dance is too image- and sex-obsessed. But most of the dance teachers I've met really are into accepting girls' bodies as they are and expressing the whole person through dance, rather than just getting kids' freak on.
Nov '10
Re: Classy vs. Crass
Midget Faded Rattlesnake
I haven't noticed Girl Scouting being so much inferior to Boy Scouting. True, where I lived, more families participated in Boy Scouts and their programs were better funded -- and this may be a nationwide phenomenon -- but once I finally convinced my family to let me be a Girl Scout, it was pretty cool. In that wholesome, dorky way.
I'm glad that you benefited from Girl Scouts, and I have very little recent personal experience of the organization, although I was a girl scout for a few years when I was a kid. At the time, I thought GS was poorly organized, but that's not my big concern with it. I'm more concerned with the politics: in recent years there have been a number of articles, such as this one, suggesting that it has become very liberal--and I remember picking up a liberal bias in their magazine even back when I was young.
Additionally, a friend of my daughter's was briefly a Girl Scout and she and her mother both agreed that the overwhelming emphasis was on caution and safety, defeating the purpose of giving girls a sense of competence and independence.
Jul '10
Re: Classy vs. Crass
Ursula,
It is a fine balancing act. Athletics are an essential outlet of male aggression and form of male bonding. But that can only work correctly if that aggression is constrained by larger civilizational rules. Remember, football started out as a "gentleman's game". To the extent that the ritualized aggression is unmoored from the constraining forces, bad things tend to happen. To worship athletics as an end to itself is to invite the nastier behavior.
That said, it is also true that "boys will be boys". As a former frat boy, I can attest to the joy that boys can attain through slightly naughty behaviors. All the more reason to enforce cultural norms and punish the little miscreannst when they get out of line.