Home School your kids in youth sports Bring the backyard back!

Home school your kids in youth sports.

Frozen Shorts is rolling out another program for kids and families frustrated by their lack of playing time on organized structure teams. We are encouraging children to play pickup games, made up games, and to have fun. Bring the backyard back.

This ever changing world that our children are growing up in is as fast paced as mankind has ever seen. Heck, I can barely turn my cell phone on and off while most people are using their cell phone as an integral part of their lives.

 Ever go out to dinner and see people with their phones on the table or in their hands talking and texting? We don’t allow that in our household. Embrace family, the time together is short, and needs to be nourished so that it will be a bond later on in life

These kids, more than ever, need coping skills that allow them to integrate these changing roles and technology, to their long term future benefit. What better way than for youth sports to be the vehicle to teach, model, and positively reinforce their abilities to handle failure, mistakes, and problems. The life skills that youth sports should be teaching have been swept aside in a large part and been replaced by a business model that features high tech training, lots of elite travel, and of course status.

Children want to play. Do you remember taking your kids to the playground when they were young? Did you notice how little structure there was? Did you see the kids going to their parents for advice? No, they just played. They figured things out on their own. Yes it was sometimes messy and didn’t work out the way we wanted, but the kids learned to cope. They learned on their own how to adjust and cooperate with the other children.

My daughter, when she was 5 years old, would go to a child on the playground she did not know and ask: “Do you want to be my friend?” How cute! Without me or my wife, they would play for an hour. They laughed and had fun.

 It really is that simple. As the world has got more complex and crazy paced we need to allow children to be children and learn at their own pace and style, not some made up metric provided by a youth sports paradigm that rewards children who happen to be a little bit more coordinated or closer to the birthday cutoff date with the label of a great athlete. Truly, it is a head start in a race that doesn’t exist.

But most importantly, we need to give them back their childhood. They are not mini adults or micro professional athletes. The most certainly are not remote controlled robots attached to adult’s personal joy sticks. They are kids and we should embrace that, not take advantage of it.
 I sign most of my books, “Change has started!” Join us; come on in, the water’s fine!