I wouldn’t be the first parent ever to lose her cool with her kids. But I pride myself on a little restraint when it comes to shouting at someone else’s child. And shouting profanities — ever — is out of the question.
Defining Childhood by Violence
Less than a week later our nation was trying to wrap its mind around heinous school violence in three separate communities. If you don’t see a correlation, perhaps you aren’t looking closely enough.
We can have coaches and teachers who model restraint, patience and positive encouragement, and certainly our kids learn from them how to behave on the field or in the classroom. But please don’t minimize what kids learn at home. Our words and our actions speak so loudly our children can’t hear anything else.
When, in our zeal, we scream for our team to “kill” theirs what message are we sending? When we holler at referees and tell coaches they don’t know how to coach, what message are we sending? When we tell third-graders to get their “asses” on the field, what message are we sending? When we humiliate our children by judging them and their performance in a game or in the classroom as one in the same, what message are we sending?
We have a generation of children growing up who will define their childhood by violence. Columbine. 9/11. The War on Terrorism. Now Bailey, Colorado, and the Amish schoolhouse shooting.
Those are menacing enough. Do we really want to add our own negative behavior to their bank of childhood memories?
Little Hearts with Big Wounds
The shooter in the Bailey school incident claimed in a four-page letter that his father was so cruel to him he couldn’t function properly as an adult. The shooter in the Amish schoolhouse claimed painful childhood incidents he never overcame. Both expressed unimaginable anger they never dealt with. And their anger was unleashed on innocent children.
Anger was certainly unleashed the night of my son’s football game. Both sides were upset and tempers flared. Oh, not everyone behaved badly; plenty of parents in the stands conducted themselves admirably. Shaken and angered, they showed self-restraint and compassion for the injured child, the worried players. They modeled self-control when children needed it most. Unfortunately those who didn’t made a stronger impact.
What kind of impact will you make when the time comes?
Charla Belinski is the author of the column “Are We There Yet?” in the Glenwood (Colorado) Post Independent where she shares her common-sense style and humorous world view on parenting each week. Charla has recently completed her first novel, It Came a Fine Rain. She lives with her husband, Tim, and three children near Aspen, Colorado. Contact her at belinskis@comcast.net.
Why Would a Grown-up…?
Yet this is exactly what happened on a recent fall evening when some overzealous parents screamed at my 7th-grade son and his teammates as they walked off the football field at a local middle school. One of my son’s teammates had just been hauled off in an ambulance for a broken arm, and by the time the game resumed it was getting too dark to play. With a team of upset middle-schoolers and a field with no lights my son’s coach asked to halt the game.
Their team left the field amid catcalls and foul language. Shouts of “Go home, you chickens” were laced with profanities the newspaper can’t print, but I’m sure you can imagine. However, the profanity that punctuated the autumn air came not from the other team’s players but from their parents.
Now, I understand a few things about the psychology of sports. For instance, taunting on the field from opposing team members is almost expected — and quickly forgotten. Wins and losses are tallied and used as fuel for a better game next week. Even broken arms will eventually heal.
But that night the words hurled by adults at children were so heinous I could literally see the boys trying to wrap their beautiful formative brains around it. “Why were they screaming at me?” they asked. “Why would a grown-up say things like that?” “We didn’t do anything,” they cried.
