So this school year, as I have expressed in some of my blogs, I became a football mom. My youngest is the only real athletic child in our family and so this was a real treat for my husband and me. Or at least we thought it was going to be.
Turns out this was going to be an experience full of challenges and lessons for not only my son but my husband and I. This is especially true for me as I learned to let go and allow my son to learn from his difficult experiences.
Not only do parents need to give their teens opportunities to make decisions but we have to allow them to endure difficulties. That isn’t easy for me to say, especially since I am not exactly a shining example of that.
My knee jerk reaction is to solve the problem and make my child happy. So when we quickly learned how unfair football would be and how miserable it would make my son, it became very challenging to sit back and wait it all out.
Without going into every details, let’s just say that all three coaches on the team have a son who plays. I am sure you can guess who gets lots of playing time. Not only did we deal with that but their sons were allowed to play more than one position in every game. My son was one of the unfortunate souls who spent more time on the sidelines than in the game. In fact, out of six games I have seen my son play a total of 5 minutes.
Disheartening? Oh, to say the least. Suddenly my son’s love of the game became the enemy of his soul. While everyone I talked to said I should say something to the coach or complain about it to the athletic director, I decided to remain silent.
I really felt there were a lot of character lessons to be learned for my son and I wanted to learn how to let my son figure things out. He is the type that prefers to say nothing and either let things be or wait for me to rescue him. But we can’t always rescue our kids.
Here is where it gets good. Two weekends ago my son finally said something to his coach. He told his coach he wanted more playing time. While I respected my son for speaking up for himself, I wasn’t very optimistic. I tried to not let that show but I didn’t want him to get let down again.
Imagine the surprise on my husband and mine’s faces when our son took to the field this past Saturday. Not only did my son start as corner on defense but he played the entire game. We were absolutely shocked but more than pleasantly surprised.
It completely changed his attitude about football and it taught him a very powerful lesson, to speak up for himself. I was so glad that it wasn’t my doing but that he was able to do it on his own.