Elevate

Some quotes that stuck out to me this week while reading the third chapter in Chap Clarks’s Hurt.

Parents are under more pressure than ever to overschedule their children and have them engage in organized sports and other activities that may be age-inappropriate.

We have evolved to the point where we believe driving is support, being active is love, and providing any and every opportunity is selfless nurture.

We are a culture that has forgotten how to be together.

We have lost the ability to spend unstructured down time.

I started competitive “try-out” football when I was eight. I remember driving 45 minutes to practice (each way) three nights a week. We’d leave at 5:00pm and get home at 9:00pm my 3rd-8th grade years.  I can remember being small enough to fall asleep completely suited up in my football gear on my dad’s faux-leather truck-bench seat each night as we drove home, my cleats touching the door and my head in my dad’s lap. My parents spent as many hours taking me to practice and games and award ceremonies as any parent could. Not just for football either. I started wrestling when I entered kindergarten at five.  A lot of time spent there, too.

It paid off, though. By the time I was a senior I was a 3-time all-state wrestler, 2-time all-state football player, 4.0 student, with pretty much a full-ride to Northwest MO State and an invitation to walk-on and play football for the 2-time national champion Bearcats. I remember my dad putting a Bearcat paw sticker on his work lunchbox, a red and white igloo that he took to construction sites with him. I had a matching paw on my truck.

Then, about nine months later, after I told my dad I wasn’t playing football anymore, I remember him not talking to me for a month. I remember being home for summer vacation after my freshmen year in college and how he’d walk up the stairs, through the living room, and stay back in his bedroom for the night until it was time to go to bed without saying “hi” to me or asking me how my day was. I confronted him about it halfway through the summer. He told me it wasn’t anything personal, he just felt like we didn’t have anything in common anymore since I was done playing football, and that he just really couldn’t think of anything that was the same anymore in our relationship.

I think that experience sums up a lot of what my generation, and the generation of current teens, feels. Loss. Aloneness. Abandonment. My parents spent hours and hours and hours on me (not to mention cash), trying to help me develop into a successful young man, and at the proverbial end of the day, my dad felt like we didn’t have anything in common anymore.

We spent tons and tons of time together, but the time was so shallow because the time we spent pursuing my sports career wasn’t really about me–it was about what I was doing; it was about making me into a more “successful” person. My life revolved around football. My identity was being a football player. We talked about how to tackle and block correctly, who we thought had the best chance of making the team, but not about how my heart was doing. So when the centralizing principle in my life finally was over, he didn’t know how to ask me how my day had been.

Being involved in sports, drama, music, and academics is important for our teens, but only if we can balance that with unstructured relational time with no agenda. A thirty minute, unstructured walk in the park with ice cream to follow is probably worth about ten times more to an adolescent than 3 hours worth of practice.

There is no formula, there is no ratio, but if you’re a parent reading this, do me a favor. Make two vertical columns in your head or on a piece of paper. In one, add up all the time you spend with your teen doing anything that’s considered structured or organized (sports, dance, cheer, arts, even studying together or driving them places, AND TV time as a family–that’s all structured with an already existing agenda that needs to be accomplished or achieved). And you know what to add up in the other–unstructured, relaxed, free, unplanned relational time.

Is there a difference between the two numbers? If so, are you happy about that? I do hope that when I’m a parent that I can at least come close to making them the equal. If I had to guess right now, I think equal would be a good thing to shoot for, though I could be wrong about that too.

Posted in: book reviews