Love That Boy

by Ron Fournier

  Mom insisted, “Everything’s fine, honey.” She was talking to Dad, not me. Later she told me to stop prying. “Let your dad feel a little bit in control.”

  —

  “WHAT’S WRONG WITH you, Bompa?”

  Tyler’s question snaps me back to the present—and I see why Tyler is alarmed. His grandfather is swaying slighting, gingerly grabbing the curved metal frame around the Detroit riot picture.

  “I’m okay, pal,” Dad mumbles. “Let’s look around more.” He points toward a chunk of the Berlin Wall in a Cold War exhibit. Tyler fires off a series of facts and anecdotes about the Cold War, something about Stalin and East Germany, an airlift, and “President Ford’s blunder about Poland.”

  Dad smiles. “He’s like a little professor.”

  The next stop is a replica of the Oval Office, where Tyler stands and stares—remembering the visit nearly 10 years earlier. Tyler points to a door, the one disguised as part of the wall, through which we had walked in to see Bush. “I’m not going to get back in, am I?” he asks.

  “Maybe,” I reply. “As president.”

  “If so,” Tyler says, “I’m bringing my dog, Rascal.”

  We tour the Watergate exhibit, which bluntly recounts the crimes of the Nixon administration. Tyler recognizes the site of the infamous burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters as the place where I now work, the Watergate complex. I try to slip a morality lesson into the tour. “So you know,” I tell Tyler, “President Ford tried to help the country heal by pardoning Richard Nixon. What does that tell you about real life?”

  Without hesitation, he says, “You do lot of good things and you do one bad thing and people don’t forgive you.”

  Ford was a father of four children who mostly avoided the pitfalls of other presidential kids. His father, Leslie King, was a brute—an alcoholic who reportedly beat Ford’s mother on the couple’s honeymoon. She had smiled at another man. The future president was still an infant when his parents divorced, and his mother eventually married Gerald Rudolff Ford, who raised and inspired the budding athlete.

  I don’t see a museum display on fatherhood. But there is a glass case filled with a football helmet, jersey, and other mementos of Ford’s athletic prowess at the University of Michigan. It triggered memories: I had played organized football through middle school, and Dad had tried to talk me into trying out for the high school team; my only regret from childhood was that I didn’t listen.

  “I hated to see you stop playing,” Dad says. My stomach tightens. I let Dad down?

  Tyler breaks the awkward silence. “Why do you make me play football, Dad?” Tyler plays flag football.

  I tell him, “Me and Mom think it’s good for you.”

  “I disagree,” he says.

  Dad grins, nods to his grandson, and tells me, “Maybe you should listen.” I give Dad a curious look. He thought I should try out for football. I ran cross-country instead and always assumed that Dad disapproved. He says no. “You might regret it now, but cross-country was good for you,” Dad says, “and I’ll never regret not pushing you.”

  For the first time I tell Dad why I quit football: As I prepared to enter eighth grade, a federal court approved the Detroit Public School desegregation plan that would require me and my siblings to ride buses across town to a mostly black neighborhood. My parents opposed busing—they considered it social experimentation, with their kids as guinea pigs—and so they enrolled us in the affluent Grosse Pointe school district. I felt like I didn’t belong, because I didn’t. We still lived in Detroit, a violation of Grosse Pointe policy that we had to keep secret, and my classmates were far richer than a cop’s kid. I tell Dad: I was insecure and alone and essentially living a lie. I didn’t want to try out for a football team I might not make. I was afraid of failure.

  “I know,” Dad says. “You got over it. You haven’t been scared by much since.” Grandfather, son, and grandson stare at Ford’s soft leather helmet until Dad breaks the silence. “You’re not me,” he says, nodding at Tyler, “and he’s not you.”

  Clumped like ants around the last crumb at a picnic, two sets of 6-year-olds—half dressed in red shirts and shorts, half in pale blue—vibrated around a frayed soccer ball, kicking it, swatting it, and in one case spitting at it. “Spread out! Spread out!” shouted Mary Schade, a part-time tutor and former teacher who turned to soccer coaching after raising her own kids. “Dearies,” she chuckled, “would you please mind spreading out?”

  Clutching coffee mugs and paper Starbucks cups, a couple dozen parents organized themselves into groups: The Bored, happily delegating authority to Coach Schade while thumbing newspapers, scanning smartphones, and scratching yellow highlighters through books and legal briefs; The Adoring, mothers and a few fathers cheering each other’s kids in a community of adulation; and The Great Santinis, mostly dads and one mom yelling instructions and rebukes. The one drill-sergeant mom shrieked, “Get your finger out of your nose, Danny, and spread out!”

  The knot of boys and girls moved in unison, a multicellular colony organized around its grass-stained nucleus, until one cell split from the rest and wandered off. It was Tyler. Taking his eye off the ball and his mind off the game, my son scooted 15 yards from the pack with stiff-legged strides. “What’s he doing?” I asked Lori. Noticing an edge in my voice, she shot me an annoyed look.

  “Maybe’s he’s looking for a pass,” Lori said.

  “Heck of a way to get a pass,” I scoffed.

  Tyler bent his knees, fell on his butt, and plucked a dandelion from midfield. “Stand up, Tyler!” shouted the coach. Tyler smiled, puckered his lips, and blew a small cloud of seeds across the soccer pitch. Then he caught my eye and waved. “Hi, Dad!” I waved and grimaced, the tortured body language of a dad trying to simultaneously say Love you and Get your ass back in the game.

  —

  Parents today encourage, guide, nudge, push, and force their kids into all forms of organized activities. Sports, of course. But there’s a broad bouquet of parental aspirations: science fairs, spelling bees, singing contests, class elections, beauty pageants, bake-offs, ballet, and more. We want them to be stars, most valuable of something. You say my Johnny can’t play shortstop? Maybe he can play the guitar! Brenda’s singing voice is a bit pitchy? Let’s see if she can pitch! We love our kids and want the best for them, so why not help them be the best? Any advantage is a good thing, right?

  That’s what Elizabeth S. told me in a pale pink hallway at BalletNova, a dance studio in Falls Church, Virginia. Wearing tight jeans and an off-the-shoulders black fringed top, Elizabeth had the chiseled face and frame of a dancer. “I performed my whole life up until I had kids, almost went professional,” said the corporate secretary and single mother from Washington, D.C. “That’s why I bring her here.” Elizabeth nodded at Angel. “I just want her to be a happy little girl.”

  For parents like Elizabeth, not just any organized activity will do. Be like me, they tell their kids—or Be what I hoped to be. Angel was not happy. She was sniffing back tears and rubbing her eyes, whispering to her mom, “I don’t want to go. I don’t want to go.”

  Elizabeth dismissed her protests. “I know you’re not crazy about it now,” she told the girl, “but Mommy didn’t like dancing at first, either.”

  I asked Elizabeth about her daughter’s true passion—maybe sports? She wrinkled her nose in disgust. “I know it’s not PC for me to say, but I want her to be a little girl. I want her to marry a nice guy—to be swept off her feet and be a mom. First I want her to be a dancer. It’s a glorious life,” she said.

  The studio door opened with a thud, and the narrow hallway was assaulted by two dozen 4-year-olds in pink tutus. “I did it!” one of them yelled while running into her mother’s arms. “How’d you do?” a father asked another. Almost lost in the torrent of noisy reunions, Angel lifted her head from Elizabeth’s shoulder and said again, “I don’t want to go.”

  “Go now,” Elizabeth said, strokin
g the girl’s cornrows. “Have fun.”

  Watching Angel slouch into the studio made me think of something written by David Brooks, a New York Times columnist with a keen eye for social change. He said “an epidemic of conditional love” is shaping parenting early in the 21st century. “Many parents bestow or withdraw their affection depending on how well their children are achieving, producing millions of young people without secure emotional foundations, who pine for any kind of approval.” The mother of four who wrote the book about geeks, Marybeth Hicks, said children are not just family for many parents, they’re an accomplishment. They’re trophies.

  Many mothers and fathers (yes, including me) trumpet their children’s success in school, sports, the arts, and the entire gamut of activities that allow for ranking—kid vs. kid and parent vs. parent. It’s a lot for a child to bear.

  —

  The people we hire to sculpt and shine our tiny trophies often make matters worse. Coaches who curse their players, bully them to play through injuries, and preach teamwork while keeping hardworking players on the bench. Pageant and contest organizers who profit off the competitions, recruiting kids with false expectations to pile up entrance fees. Teachers and tutors who ruthlessly weed out average and below-average students in search of the prodigy.

  Average no longer is good enough, particularly in sports, where professionalism has encroached on puberty—for both girls and boys. One coach, Randel Hanson, wrote in Commons magazine with author Kathryn Milun, “For youth baseball, this professionalization often means playing year-round on hyper-competitive and exclusive club teams for as many as 120-plus games annually, regularly traveling to interstate and even international tournaments, teaching kids to throw curve balls at ever younger ages, and demanding time commitments which rival that of Major League Baseball participants.”

  This intensity twists the concept of sportsmanship. One in every 10 kids acknowledged cheating in a game, according to a 2005 study published in the Journal of Research in Character Education, while 13 percent had tried to hurt an opponent. Twenty percent of coaches reportedly made fun of kids on their teams.

  One of the largest U.S. coalitions of professional and amateur sports organizations, Citizens Through Sports Alliance, finds youth sports lacking in emotional support. With input from parents, coaches, officials, and program directors, the group’s 2005 report card gave average grades to coaching and officiating. Two categories received D’s: “child-centered philosophy” and “parental behavior.”

  Every 25 seconds in America, a child visits an emergency room for a sports-related injury, according to a Safe Kids Worldwide survey, for a total of 1.35 million children in 2012 alone. The figures don’t include injuries due to “overuse,” 25 percent of which are serious. In a New York Times op-ed column, pediatric orthopedic surgeon Ron J. Turker recalled an office visit by a teenager named Lucas and his two parents. He told them Lucas had a torn anterior cruciate ligament.

  “You don’t understand, this is his life!” the boy’s mom said.

  “We need this fixed—he’s in the Olympic Development Program!” the dad said of his 13-year-old son. “He’s elite!”

  —

  Most parents know the drill. We toggle between competing emotions: disappointment when our kids don’t conquer an activity; pride when they do; and gnawing guilt for raising them, selfishly and destructively, as extensions of our dreams. The parents most buffeted by these feelings are those who imagined their child as a mini-me.

  An acquaintance of mine named Fergus Cullen is a competitive distance runner who has coached high school teams for 15 years. As much as he adores his 9-year-old son, Jacob, Cullen said there was no getting around the fact that “Jacob is not like me.” The boy struggled in school and had no taste for sports. One year, Cullen was visiting his parents’ home when his nephew walked into the living room and asked permission to watch ESPN, the sports network. A wave of shame crashed over Cullen as he said to himself, Gosh, I love to watch a little SportsCenter with my nephew, but that’s never going to happen with Jacob.

  For many parents, like Cullen, the basic desire to bond with their children compels them to push. In simpler times, a parent and child bonded through work—on the farm or on behalf of the family. The relationship wasn’t ideal, but it was reliable. Modern parents compete with new technology and new media not just for their kids’ time and attention but also for their interests. “If I can’t convince him to play catch with me,” said Cullen, who works in New Hampshire as a political consultant, “I know darn well I’m going to lose him to the screens.”

  David B. is a Wall Street broker who lives in New Jersey with his wife and two kids. When his son, Richard, threatened to quit baseball during middle school, David balked. He told me, “My kid was a great player, and to just give it up…”

  David’s wife told her husband to ease off: “You’re always trying to put baggage on him.” David found comfort in an episode of the ABC comedy Modern Family, one where the father freaks out because his young son suddenly asks to stop performing magic, their shared passion. That dad at first refuses to listen. “This isn’t about magic,” he says.

  “No,” replies the son. “It’s about my life and you controlling it.”

  The follow-in-my-footsteps fantasy is just one reason for the professionalization of childhood. Another is economic pressure, which increases the appeal for prize money, fattened college applications and scholarships, and pro contracts. The new economy also has increased the number of two-income families, which means kids today are without parental supervision more than ever. After-school clubs, academic tutors, organized athletics, and the like are competition-cum-babysitting.

  In the summer, with school out, busy parents pay small fortunes to enroll their kids in “camps.” Not that long ago, summer camp consisted of rustic cabins, bonfires, lakes, and woods—everybody thrown together and thrown outdoors. Today, summer camp can be indoors and gravitate toward one of two extremes: maniacally competitive (my niece attends piano camp for budding prodigies) or structured to pander to teen trends and tastes. One year, Tyler attended a two-week camp at a boarding school in Connecticut where he studied the history of the world via video games.

  —

  Past generations of parents had more realistic expectations—lower and less ambitious—than today’s moms and dads. It was understood that an unlucky number of children are born disabled, a fortunate few become superstars in some field, and most of us are perfectly middling. That used to be okay. But modern parents don’t always accept those odds. We’d rather define the extraordinary downward by pretending that everybody is a winner. It’s the superstar syndrome. From the playing fields to the recital halls and beyond, every parent’s “trophy” gets a trophy.

  Children aren’t dummies. They know there’s a cost for the affirmation and ambition. “The only way to pay back parents for their sacrifices and efforts is through accomplishments, be they academic, athletic, or social,” write Dr. Alvin Rosenthal and Nicole Wise in The Overscheduled Child. This principle applies not just to sports but also to the variety of ways modern parents enmesh themselves in the lives of their children. Kids face two sorts of pressure from moms and dads: the kind that comes in their parents’ direct pursuit of achievement, and the indirect pressure that children intuitively absorb.

  Some kids crack. One of every five 18-year-olds has suffered major depression, and nearly 9 percent of adolescents have been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. The Overscheduled Child authors, one of whom is a child psychiatrist, attribute those numbers largely to pressures from mothers and fathers. While others may disagree, the consensus of experts is that the rise of depression and anxiety is strongly linked to parental expectations.

  More than a dozen years ago, David Brooks wrote a seminal essay in The Atlantic titled “The Organization Kid,” decrying what he called America’s “achievement ethos” and the result: a generation of children leading a “frenetic, tightly packed existence.” Kid
s want their childhood back. Nearly 80 percent of American children say they wish they had more free time, according to a 2006 survey conducted by the KidsHealth KidsPoll, while 41 percent say they feel stressed most of the time because they have too much to do.

  When today’s parents were growing up, kids wandered the neighborhood. Curb ball, hide-and-seek, kick the can, king of the hill, cowboys and Indians, footraces, bike races, sack races, and long treks to the store, paper-route money crumpled in sweaty pockets. Sports were mostly played pickup—“shirts vs. skins and Mr. Briggs’ house is an automatic out!” Organized sports involved a game on the weekends and a few weekday practices, but still there was plenty of time to just play.

  We overschedule our kids, enable their digital distractions, and shield them from harm—and the result is what experts call a national “play crisis.” Seventy percent of mothers say they played outdoors every day when they were young, according to a study by Rhonda Clements of Manhattanville College, compared with only 31 percent of their children. Recess time has been trimmed or cut in schools across the country. The National Institute for Play (NIP) estimates that playtime outside has decreased 71 percent in one generation in both the United States and the United Kingdom.

  Scientists say that when children play, neurons fire in a child’s prefrontal cortex, where executive functions are controlled. That makes play critical to learning how to control emotions, make plans, and solve problems. “Whether it’s rough-and-tumble play or two kids deciding to build a sand castle together, the kids themselves have to negotiate, ‘Well, what are we going to do in this game? What are the rules we are going to follow?’ ” Sergio Pellis, a researcher at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, told National Public Radio for a series on kids’ play. And after years of researching violent individuals, the NIP concluded that play actually can deter violence in children.