Baseball - Boys to Men II
I mentioned a couple of days ago that the Gender Blog had a great series geared toward men utilizing lessons learned from baseball. Today, I want to share another chapter from that series.
This one is particularly striking because it addresses elements (failure, losing) that help build real character in our boys, helping them to become solid men. But these are elements that are sadly brushed aside in the pursuit of “self-worth” and building children’s “self-esteem”. Pardon me for being blunt, but maybe we’ve got just a little too much self-esteem going on these days. It makes me ill to think that we cannot allow our children to “lose” because it would damage them. So we don’t even count runs in a lot of places (by the way, most kids count anyway). We can’t give failing grades because it would hurt their feelings. Maybe I’m old school, but a little failure is a good thing in my book. Our junior sports teams and elementary schools may be protecting their feelings by preventing failure, but they will have no such luxury in the real adult world we are preparing them for. Failure and losing is real. Learning to deal with it appropriately is extremely important. Rather than protecting our boys self-esteem, we need to be training them to be men.
Today’s post will touch on FAILURE, HUMILITY, RESILIENCE, & WINNING & LOSING. Great stuff!
