Since Liam was about 2 I've always though he looked like the quintessential baseball player, straight down to his natural batting pose and old fashioned baseball physique (think Shoeless Joe, not Babe Ruth.) Anyway, Liam has loved every sport we've signed him up for, and soccer best of all. The camera man at our local public television station has two athletic (and musical but that hasn't anything to do with this story) older boys and he advised me to skip tball. He said they're just too little and it's basically just painful for the parents to sit through and not of much use for the kids. Well this year since we started Liam at a new school and some of his friends were doing tball and had done so last year and liked it, we signed him up. Long story short he got on a team with one of his good friends from class and really loved the sport just like everything else he's done. (sidenote: and he really DOES look the part.) They give them MLB uniforms and it's really well done and I am impressed. A few weeks ago they asked each kid to nominate 3 kids from the team for the All Star game. Now the thing is, in these games they don't keep score, no one strikes out, the best you can do is make it to first, and the whole thing is just a way for kids to learn a bit about the game and get out there on the diamond. Everyone comes home and every team finishes with the same number of points. And after every game Liam thinks he was totally awesome. In this sport more than most I would say the ability at the kindergarten level is really very similar across the kids. In basketball especially and in soccer to a lesser degree you would see some real standouts, but I have never seen that in this sport. So, I was totally confused by this all star thing and knew Liam wouldn't get nominated because he only knows one person on the team, and that person and most of the rest of the kids know each other. So, yesterday was already a rough day when Eric gets the email that says which 4 kids made the All Star team. Liam was not one. However his friend was (and so it turns out was at least one other friend on another team and of course all three of them played yesterday while I watched feeling a tad sick to my stomach, since for a while the two "all stars" buddied up apart from Liam. Midway through though they were all playing fine, and Liam just played with other people when his friends were not playing with him.) I am totally for letting kids deal with disappointments and if it were 4th or 5th grade and it actually meant something, though I think it would be harder on Liam, I think it would at least be more appropriate than telling 4 of 12 kindergartners, "you guys are All Stars" and the other 8, who up to this point felt they were All Stars too, "sorry but you didn't make the team." What is the logic in that? I too am sick of the helicopter parent phenomenon, everyone gets a trophy, no one ever loses... And yes I can be too pampering and neurotic at times, but I feel like a pretty reasonable parent and I just don't think this is cool because it's Kindergarten. If Liam had made it I would have felt relief and really sorry for the other 2/3 of the kids who didn't. Am I overreacting? For the record this bothers me far more than it bothers Liam (who I think is just a slight bit bothered that there is another game but he doesn't get to play in it, because he wants the season to keep going.)
I'm reading a book called Bringing Up Bebe, which is about parenting (well really mothering) in France and what they do better than us. Usually I hate that kind of crap and I never read parenting rags or blogs because it's mostly fear mongering and worthless, but this book has some points that have left me thinking. Yet it also reminds me how over involved American parenting has become, whch is why I wish to be able to say "no biggie" but no, I'm American and part of that is being an American parent, for good or bad. So there.
