Failure is not an option

 Somebody in my office brought up a thought today about how kids these days don’t learn what it means to fail and how spoiled many of them are. It’s something that has bothered me from things i have seen in the past few years, so i thought i would rant a little about it.

Kids these days are not being taught what it means to fail. Their are so many parents these days that baby there kids and take it too easy on them.  I’ve noticed this trend mainly in youth sports. It seems to me that many parents are trying to relive their glory days through their kids.  For example, when i was an assistant varsity basketball coach a few years back, we had several parents complaining about their kids playing time. It was blatently obvious that their kids were not good basketball players, therefore didn’t deserve the playing time.  So instead of teaching their kid the lesson that in order to play, you will need to work hard to get better, the parents just want to make sure their kids feelings aren’t hurt. This does nothing to help a kid develop socially and mentally.

Another example was when the Indiana High School Basketball Athletic Association decided to divide all the schools into classes in 1998, making the yearly single class tournament a 4 class tournament. So instead of having a smaller school have a chance of beating a larger school in the tournament, you now had only the smaller schools playing the smaller schools and the larger schools playing the larger schools. I can understand why the NCAA has different divisions, mainly because of the amount of schools and the lack of funding and revenue a smaller schools has. But basically the IHSAA, which consists of roughly of 350 teams, wanted to make things easier for the kids by making the competition easier. What does this teach a kid?

In high school sports, so much of the winning and losing depends on the coaching. Their usually are only a handful of teams that would win on talent alone. If a coach has a good system in place as far a discipline and has taught the proper x’s and o’s, then those 5 players on the floor will be able to compete with anybody. Think Princeton vs. UCLA in the NCAA tournament circa 1997 i think, maybe 98′. Princeton was definitley overmatched physically(aka a lot of little nerdy white guys), but because they ran their system practically perfect, they were able to beat the defending national champ powerhouse UCLA. I garuantee that just having the opportunity  to play a team like UCLA was much more satisfying than if they would of had to play in a different tournament vs. other small schools. I know if i played for a good smaller school in high school, i would of much rather had my shot at the big boys then having an easier road to a small school championship. Why not just give every team a championship trophy just for trying?! Seems that is what the underlying theme is in reality that the IHSAA was going for.

When a kid grows to being an adult, he needs to of learned what it means to compete for something. He needs to understand that it takes hard work to get somewhere in life.  Nobody is going to hand you a position at a company just because they feel sorry for you.  Yeah, you might have a connection that enables you to land a job you shouldn’t have, but that isn’t something anybody should depend on.

If a kid doesn’t learn how to fail at an early age, he won’t know how to deal with failure later in life. And if you have not developed any resolve by the time you become a young adult, then you are pretty much screwed. We all know that we all fail at things almost on a daily basis, but most of us typically understand how to pick ourselves back up and push and try harder next time. I am afraid that many of the youngsters of this next generation will have not learned what it means to fail, and they will certainly have a hard time as a result. They will not understand that they are responsible and will always want to place the blame on somebody else. Yeah, kids are much more advanced these days because of technology and many kids now a days even teach their parents when it comes to certain things, but that doesn’t mean that discipline and accountability should go out the window.

Anyway, that’s enough rambling…hopefully my generation that are now becoming young parents will re-install some discipline in the household and not bow down to every kids wish.