As a parent, I want to teach my children all of life’s lessons.
There are some lessons they just have to learn themselves. Once they do, there’s no telling what they can do.
My 9-year-old and 10-year-old daughters struggled mightily with self-confidence recently.
The younger one went into cheerleading and questioned if she could really do it. She kept coming home from practices saying it was too hard, and she’d never remember all the cheers.
The other joined a youth volleyball team. Her nemesis was serving the ball, with the net or the floor snatching the ball before it could cross to the other side.
In both cases, my advice was the same: You have to practice. In the typical fashion of a struggling child, they promptly ignored me.
In their minds, these things should be easy. They watch other people do them, and it seems so natural when they do it. My daughters wondered if they’d been genetically programmed to fail at these activities.
I’m not sure where they got the idea life was supposed to be easy. I’ve told them anything worth having is worth working for most of their lives. The people who work the hardest get the most (with some exceptions for status that I’ll explain to them when they’re older and less naive).
Bless their hearts, but they don’t think their mother and I struggle with anything. They don’t realize the creeping self-doubt we all have, on everything from work to personal lives to remembering song lyrics properly.
They’ve heard their dad’s football stories, limited as they might be, like the time I was offered a spot on the football team at a small college where I’d applied (due to my grade point average, not my yards per catch) or the time I accidentally sacked the quarterback my senior year when the coach put a wiry 140-pound kid in at nose tackle as a gag.
The stories they never heard aren’t quite as exciting, like the times I’d ride my bike five miles to go lift weights in a teammate’s home gym at 6:30 a.m., or I’d bike out to our quarterback’s house to throw the ball around for hours on end.
No, we don’t highlight the hard work people put into things. We highlight their accomplishments, which really shortchanges all the sweat they put into them.
Last week, both of these girls learned that lesson on their own. Our 10-year-old daughter became obsessed with learning to serve the volleyball over the net properly. She spent more time with a volleyball in the past week than I’d seen her do in the past six months.
And you know what happened at her game Saturday? She got the ball over the net repeatedly.
Our youngest learned to channel her endless enthusiasm and peppy spirit into learning those cheers. And in her first year of doing it, she’s keeping up with an impressive group of girls.
Do they have room for improvement? Absolutely. We all do. But now they know what it’ll take to get better, and they learned that on their own.
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