Raising Kids With Character

If your kids are in soccer then you are used the annual email requesting more coaches. I have to say being in youth ministry for almost a decade and a half that finding volunteers is pretty much the bane of every leader’s life. There was a time when I answered the call and for a few years I did coach soccer… at least until skill was required. You know, coaching 6 year olds is far more about your ability get them to stop picking their nose in goal and watch the goal, than actually keeping the ball out of the goal. I’m pretty good at coaching nose-pickers, but once they actually started to care about soccer and not holding hands with their best friend and tra-la-lalling around the soccer pitch, I was out. To everyone’s relief.

At that point soccer became a spectator sport for me and I have to say, coaching actually turned out to be a good way to keep from being bored at soccer games. I totally get the cuteness factor, but man alive, can those games ever drag on once the cuteness has worn off. I distinctly remember when my son’s soccer team got good. It wasn’t that they won every game (FAR from it) but there was actually some strategy involved and a bit of competition on the field.

This has been a relatively new phenomenon however, and, apparently, short-lived, because no sooner had he gotten decent at soccer than he started volleyball. Volleyball was new and that meant starting from scratch with new skills and ways of thinking. And, by default, less entertainment for me (they aren’t even really cute anymore at this age.) But I still go.

I will admit that I don’t always jump at the chance to go to a volleyball game, I’m not much of an athlete and it’s a tricky experience with three boys under the age of four in tow. But I always go because I know that my attendance at my son’s volleyball game has far more to with my presence than anything else.

I may not have been an athlete but I was an artist and a musician and I distinctly remember what it was like to know my parents would be at the art show at the end of the year or at a recital – or concert later on. And I know full well that my first art shows displayed little more than an accumulation of doodles and that my first recitals were, well, brutal. But mom and dad were there and their presence is a precious memory for me.

You will never attend your child’s events for you, it is always for them. Remember this at the next hockey game when you are losing your mind over the bad officiating and remember this the next time you can’t peel yourself off the couch to attend a school assembly.