November 07, 2002 - 11:15 p.m.
You know, there are a few things that worry me as a parent.
One of them is other parents.
When I was in 3rd grade, I started participating in the local children's theater and stuck with it, off an on, through about 8th grade. When I wasn't doing it, my sister was, so we had a wide exposure to Crazy Stage Parents.
Crazy Stage Parents come in a variety of guises but all of them boil down to one common theme - they want to brag about their superior children. And these people can really scare the hell out of me.
There's an article today which begins "A New Brunswick father is suing the provincial amateur hockey association after his 16-year-old son failed to win the league's most-valuable-player award." There was a vote, his son wasn't chosen, so the boy came home, threw his hockey gear in a corner and went to his room to sulk, vowing to never play again. Does his father tell him that there's more to sports than awards? Does he let him mope and grumble until the mood has passed? Does he in any way allow his son to deal with disappointment? Nope - he takes the association to court for $300,000 in psychological and punitive damages! To boot, he wants the boy who was voted MVP stripped of his trophy so it can be given to his son, along with another award given to a different boy. All because the kid's feelings got hurt.
His father was quoted with this little gem: "I taught him since he learned to skate at three years old that hard work brings rewards. But that didn't happen... I didn't want to go this far but hopefully it will be an example to others."
An example of what - that if someone else gets the recognition you think you deserve you should be a sore loser and throw a temper tantrum in the courts?
Of course hard work brings rewards: skill; pride; a contribution to your team. Sometimes it brings recognition and trophies - only sometimes. And if you're doing it for just the awards, then you're likely to be the glory hound using everyone else for his own advancement - and the one everyone else would just love to smack a puck into.
But I think the father is more of the glory hound than his son. He reminds me of the woman who accosted the children's theater director when the cast list for Alice in Wonderland went up with her own selected cast - starring her daughter, of course. I knew the girl. We had started in the group about the same time and were beginning to get a little old for it. I was short so I could pull off standing on stage with kids two or three years younger than me. She couldn't. And I suppose her mother wanted her to have one big role before she left - validation for all the time and money she'd spent. But it was not to be. I mean, the girl had less charisma than Al Gore. And I can't believe she would happily take a part that her mother demanded be taken from someone else. But her mother, Crazy Stage Parent, really believed she was doing what was best for her child.
I know there are more out there - Crazy Stage Parents on soccer fields and in auditoriums, screaming for the rewards that their hard-working children so richly deserve. And, eventually, I'm going to have to encounter them. So if you happen to run across a way to politely tell someone to "sit down and shut the hell up," send me a copy for future reference.
