Why are so many parents holding their boys back? Is it really good for them? And what impact is it having on everybody else?
"I got paid $100 for that shot," one of my players told me as we warmed up for our basketball game, referring to a close-range layup the prior week. No, I'm not an NBA coach. The player wasn't referring to some elaborate point shaving scheme cooked up by would-be sports agents to high school prodigies. The player was six years old.
The kid's parents had paid him to make a basket. I was floored. Speechless. He said it in passing like it didn't really matter, like even he thought it was kind of weird.
Pretty soon the boys were laughing and chasing each other around cones I had set up, trying without much success to dribble the miniature balls while playing tag. Clearly, having fun was way more important to this kid than any parent's $100 payout. But it stuck with me as a sign of something profoundly wrong with our generation of parents, and a potential danger to the generation of kids, especially boys, that we are raising.
It reminded me of what a kindergarten teacher at a private school in Boston recently told me: "I was cornered by an applicant's father who asked that if he sent his child to me in pre-K, could I promise that his child would get into to Harvard in 14 years."
Most particularly it made me think of the increasing number of families who are holding back their sons at the age of five, particularly in private schools, in order to increase their competitive advantage, following, perhaps without knowing it consciously, the line of thinking that has been used to produce professional hockey players.
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