By Tova Mirvis.
From the first pitch, I was worried. My
ten-year-old son, Eitan, didn't have the same confident stance
as the other kids on his Little League baseball team; he didn't
take major-league-imitating practice swings. For the first few
games, Eitan didn't swing at all.
He'd stopped playing organized baseball years before, after a
season of T-ball and half a season of Farm League. In the land of
T-ball, there are no outs, and everyone is a winner. In Farm
League, the world darkens: there are still no losers but there are
outs. When Eitan emerged unprepared into this barely-competitive
world and was tagged out on one of his first at-bats, he started to
cry, feigning injury to save his pride.
Always a sensitive kid, each of his at-bats became a major
tribulation. After a few more outs, and a few more crying spells,
he didn't want to go to the remaining games. The following
season, he didn't want to play again, and not being a
force-your-kids-to-do-activities-that-will-require-you-to-drive-them-around-two-or-three-nights-a-week-at-dinnertime
kind of mom, I didn't make him. He played baseball for fun in
the backyard and still loved the Red Sox, but despite my
husband's fond memories of playing Little League until he was
in high school, I assumed that this wasn't going to be
something in which we took part. So Eitan wouldn't play sports
— there were lots of other things he could do.
Not until my younger son Daniel emerged a rabid sports fan —
enacting entire baseball games in our living room, which he
narrates in the exact intonation as the announcers on ESPN — did
the subject come up again. Daniel was clearly destined for the
T-ball field. Maybe it was just sibling rivalry, but his younger
brother's enthusiasm made Eitan reconsider his previous
steadfast stance.
"Do you think I should play?" he asked me this past
spring, his face a mask of ambivalence and uncertainty.
Do you tell them to toughen up or do you wrap them in consoling
hugs? Or maybe that was my face. In the ensuing
years, I'd heard him recount too many stories of "not
being good at sports," and I was wary of wading back into an
environment in which I knew he would feel immense pressure. Here
was one of those choose-your-own-adventure moments of parenting: Do
you force them to go or let them bow out? Do you tell them to
toughen up or do you wrap them in consoling hugs? Do you steer your
kids to those areas in which you know they will succeed, or
encourage them to try new things, even if you can anticipate the
meltdowns and self-castigation?
I also wondered why Eitan was interested in playing, when he'd
disliked it so much the last time. Had he imbibed the message, out
there in the world (and however unwittingly in our house), that
boys should play sports? I thought about all those studies
celebrating the positive effect of sports on self-esteem, and
wondered if for every kid whose confidence is bolstered there is
another kid who is scarred by the humiliation.
"Why does he have to play?" a friend asked me when I
called to bemoan the potential weeks of baseball ahead, assuming
that we (read: my husband) had talked him into this.
"He doesn't have to. He wants to," I said.
That was the kicker: As nervous as he was about his athletic abilities, he wanted to try again. Swallowing our own nervousness, we decided that if he wanted to play, we wanted him to play. My husband practiced with him. We reminded him that many of the kids would be older and had played continuously for the last number of years. We talked about good sportsmanship and trying your best, which sounded like platitudes as I put them forth, even though they were what we really believed, right? It's about trying something new, about physical activity and good sportsmanship. Most of all, it's about remembering that it's only a game.
For the ten weeks of AAA Little League, which Eitan was now old enough to play, we stood on the sidelines, next to parents with fold-up sports chairs and detached confidence in their kids' abilities. In AAA, there are not just outs but winners and losers; somewhere between T-ball and AAA, it stops being cute to run the bases in the wrong direction, to have the ball perpetually roll underfoot. Thankfully, the degree of intensity — on the part of the players, the coaches and the parents — is at least publicly reigned in. This was Little League 2.0, in which we'd all signed a "Zero Tolerance Policy" stating that we would not berate, belittle, demean, nor would we care excessively who won or lost.
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