Parents: Is there value in subjecting kids to unpleasant things just because?

I think very few parents would seek out unpleasant situations solely for their children to get accustomized to unleasantry. But unpleasant things may arise, and should the child have an option to avoid them?

What about going to the funeral of a family member or neighbor – should that be mandatory? Or other things that might come under a heading of family oblogations 00 like visiting sick relatives in the hospital?

Boyo Jim, I think what many people here are saying is exactly that life subjects kids (along with everyone else) to plenty of unpleasantness. Kids should be made (or allowed) to deal with this unpleasantness in varying degrees dependent upon their age and circumstances. We can’t shield them from all of it even if we’re so inclined. It certainly doesn’t make sense, in my opinion, to artificially add unpleasantness to their lives.

My daughter failed math this year. Not because she can’t do the work, but because she hates math with the fire of a thousand suns. She’s currently in summer school for math, which means that she’s spending 2 hours each day for the majority of her summer doing this thing she hates, and she had to pay $170 (a pretty hefty fee for a 15 year old) to do it. The city demands that she attend summer school in order to advance to grade ten, and I demand that she pay for it herself, because she failed for reasons other than inability. The fact that she has to take and pass math despite her hatred for it is an unpleasant fact of life. The fact that she now has to suffer for failing is called consequences. These are valuable life lessons.

Now, what lesson would be taught if she **passed ** math, and I made her go to summer school for it anyway, just *because * she hates it? I’m guessing the lesson learned would be that working all year to pass it was a waste of her time, and mom is friggin’ evil.

I was honestly just trying to get a good discussion going, which it looks like we have! I purposely didn’t go into details about my family’s situation because I wanted to keep the discussion more general, and everyone has done a good job of covering a lot of different angles.

I think part of the problem is age. Manda JO gives five years old as an example of someone who won’t necessarily know ahead of time if they are going to like or hate something. Our son is six, has no older siblings, doesn’t have a whole lot of kids his age in the neighborhood and doesn’t watch a lot of TV (thank goodness) so doesn’t really know what is out there. He is also hearing impaired and though he covers it up well he sometimes doesn’t “get” everything that is going on around him.

He knows his friends are in things like soccer and T-Ball and gymnastics but hasn’t consistently expressed a desire to participate as well. Should my wife and I sign him up for things we think he might like? What if he says no ahead of time? What if he says YES ahead of time, then says NO when we get there? What if he insists he likes it after the first session, then swears he hates it after the second session?

I really want to know what people think about how to deal with stuff like this, when to push, when to back off, when to make him follow through on commitments, and so on.

Boyo Jim you bring up another whole category of obligations. We haven’t had to cross the family funeral bridge yet but I think we would strongly encourage him to go, if for no other reason than he might regret it when he was older if he didn’t go.

Lauging Lagomorph, for what it’s worth, at six, I don’t think anyone expects a heroic level of commitment from them. I’d take him for a couple of T-Ball or gymnastics lessons, see how he feels about them, and proceed from there.

There’s definitely no harm in exposing a kid that age to everything possible. And of course, kids are mercurial. I do believe that there’s value in making him go to that second gymnastics lesson even if he says he doesn’t feel like it, because there’s a very good chance that once he’s there he’ll enjoy it. I don’t, however, believe that there’s value in dragging him there kicking and screaming, because once he’s there, he’s going to hate it on principle.

Letting your kids deal with the “ugly” that they run into is one thing; forcing them into a wall is a different animal.

The first should be done, up to a point; I think this is what the OP is really worried about - jump too early saying “oh my poor baby” and the kid who’s fallen down but not been hurt at all starts crying because momma scared him, not because he’s hurt; jump too late, your kid may get hurt badly. Sorry, I don’t think there’s any line drawn on the floor saying what’s the right time to jump; it even varies by kid. The second is abuse - I’ve seen many parents force stuff on their kids that they would never try to force onto anyone else (and no, I’m not talking about eating their veggies).

There’s no need to seek out unpleasant experiences to subject your child to. Life will provide them without asking you first.

We raised two boys to manhood with equal measures of “let 'em” and “make 'em.” There were the chores – they had to care for any pets they talked us into getting, and one of the hardest things I ever had to do was get rid of a dog I had grown rather fond of because the boys wouldn’t feed it as they had agreed. (Not to worry – we live in rural Colorado, and the dog really did go to a farm family who needed him more than we did.) They had to take out the trash, scoop the walk in the winter and mow the lawn in the summer (when old enough) and mostly that was because their old man had to do it when he was a kid, and has to do it now that they’re gone.

We had only one rule about extra-curricular activities and other “fun stuff”: You start it, you finish it. We let one of the boys quit only once – when we witnessed the blatant unfairness and unsportsmanlike conduct of his summer league baseball coach. Otherwise, if we invest in a trumpet, you play it until the end of the school year. You have a conflict with a coach, you work it out with the coach. If you want to be a Boy Scout, you gotta’ go sell the popcorn.

That was hard, too, like the time we actually forced one of the boys to build a rocket, shoot it and record the results because he’d joined 4-H but decided it wasn’t cool enough for him. He’s the “stubborn one,” and if he learned anything, he learned to not sign up for something you know nothing about.

My mother made me go to swim camp one summer, even though I had never been a competitive swimmer, I had no interest in being a competitive swimmer, and was fat and slow in the water. I liked swimming, and enjoyed lessosn at the Y, but I had finished the highest level, so I guess the quesiton was where to go from there.

Mom felt that I should “have a sport,” and, further, that because I enjoyed swimming (alone, and slowly) that swimming naturally should be “my sport.” I wasn’t against the whole swim camp thing; I just took her at her word when she said it would be a good experience for me.

Because I had never been on a swim team (unlike all the other attendees–WTF was my mother thinking?) the coach decided that I should be in the 9-11 age group, even though I was 12, because it would be easier.

What did I learn that summer?

  1. It is humiliating to be constantly and thoroughly beaten at “your sport” by nine-year-olds when you’re 12.
  2. Miniature-jock 9-to-11-year-old girls aren’t interested in being friends with a fat, slow, nerdy twelve-year-old.
  3. Even if you can barely move from exhaustion at the end of the day, and you literally cry every day when your mother picks up and sob and beg the entire way home not to have to go the next day, you still have to go because if you quit you’ll never know what you can acheive and besides it’s already paid for.
  4. Spending 8 weeks having nobody to talk to during the day and barely saying two words to your family at night because you’re a) exhausted and b) so mad at them that you can’t say anything nice, so you’re just not going to say anything at all is not the best situation for healthy adolescent social development.
  5. Even if you try your hardest, you’re still going to suck at the end. Unfortunately, I had never been in a training program that was appropriate for me, and had no idea what it was like to see improvement through steady effort. What was cemented in my mind was that you either succeeded if you were “athletic” or you failed if you weren’t. Guess what category I was in. Also, IIRC, we didn’t do any kind of assessment of our progress. It was just fifty little girls in a pool, swimming lots and lots of laps. (I guess you were expected to see your times improve when you went to practice with your team… 'cept I wasn’t on a team.) I think I was giving off palpable waves of humiliation at all times, and looked so huge and fat and awkward and ridiculous compared to the tiny, dolphin-like preadolescents around me that the coach and his assistants probably thought the kindest thing was to leave me be, so I got no guidance or encouragement or feedback. It’s impossible to think there wasn’t some improvement, and I lost about 10 pounds, but at the time all I knew was that on the first day of the program, I was the slowest, fattest person in the pool and on the last day, I was the slowest, fattest person in the pool. Probably I was faster than when I started, but so was everybody else, so how was I gonna know?

FWIW, I guess I also learned that eight weeks is not forever.

I was 30 years old before I got over it, and realized that doing physical activity in a group could be anything other than humiliating, that a coach, trainer, or instructor can be a knowledgable ally, not just someone whose job was to make unreasonable demands that you could never fulfill, and that you can challenge yourself without going straight to the the “Omigod all I want to do is puke and fall over and never move again” level.

I certainly don’t want to say that you should never force your kid to do something he is a little bit iffy about, but making him to stick with it no matter what isn’t necessarily the best policy. Yeah, there are going to be rough spots that he just needs to work through, and you shouldn’t just let him get up after the first or the second session. But if it’s becoming clear that the activity is above his level, don’t just assume he’ll catch up. And don’t pretend that the social aspects don’t exist. If he feels isolated and unwelcome, recognize that this is going to color his experience of the activity forever.

You should stay in contact with the adult in charge of the activity and get their input on how the kid’s really doing, but, to be honest, those people can sometimes be totally clueless. So maybe you gotta listen to your kid about it, too. (I still have no idea how my mother could sit there with me bawling in the car every day—and I was not the kind of kid who cries at the drop of a hat, seriously—and tell me that I had to keep going.)

Let the kid try out a variety of things, and for Mike’s sake, don’t stick him in some expensive program and then force him to keep going when he’s miserable because you, like an idiot, shelled out a bunch of cash.

My parents had a brilliant approach to this issue, one that worked perfectly for both my brother Gabe and myself. They laid down a rule: at all times, you must be participating in one sport and studying one musical instrument. That was the only rule. We got to decide which sport and which musical instrument; we got to switch sports and instruments whenever we wanted. But we had to be taking one of each at all times.

I started piano lessons in first grade and stuck with them until I left for college. Gabe also started piano early, quit after four or five years, took up the guitar and later the fiddle. In sports, Gabe played soccer from first grade through high school. I bounced around through soccer, basketball, baseball, gymnastics, swimming, and martial arts. But it was always something.

In one case, I declared that I was going to quit soccer and join a basketball team. My parents found one, and I attended a few practices and one game. I immediately hated it (the coach didn’t take long to realize that I had no talent), so I quit and went back to soccer. My parents lost some money on that, but it was still within the rule.

Now, why is this approach so brilliant? Because it forces the children to make the decisions for the right reasons rather than the wrong reasons. So when Gabe decided to quit piano lessons, he knew that he wouldn’t be allowed to slack off and spend more time watching TV or something else worthless. He would have to spend the same amount of time on studying guitar. Therefore, he was making the decision because he enjoyed guitar more than piano–the right reason. Likewise when I gave up basketball and returned to soccer, it didn’t mean any reduction in requirements for me. I did it because I prefered soccer.

(not a parent. Thank Og. But I have parents.)

My parents never really forced me or my sister into anything: they insisted on schoolwork and such, of course, but they were fairly content to let my sister and I chose our own activities.

However: If we asked to get involved in something, we had to follow through. The first year I played softball (I was about 8, I think), they said sure, but said that even if I didn’t like it, I’d have to stick it out for the whole season. Same when I started martial arts: They finally signed me up for lessons, on the condition that even if I hated it, I’d go through the first two months*.

I’m really thankful they did it that way. I know how to make my own choices now, and I take pride in seeing things through. Even in high school: I did a summer volunteer program one which basically boiled down to a month of hard labor in a national park in Kentucky (don’t ask). Midway through I was miserable and about an inch away from asking them to let me come home then. Probably, they’d have let me if I decided to, because a) I really was miserable and b) they said to me that I was old enough to make that decision for myself. After a long conversation I decided to stay and finish the last few weeks there, and I’m glad I did.

*Actually, after two solid years of my begging them, my parents finally caved and signed me up for a MA class with the hopes that I’d try it, it would be some phase I was going through, and I’d quit after a few months. They finally admitted this to me after I’d been training for about six years. I guess that goes to show that they held themselves to the same standard as my sister and I: If you start something, you finish it.

I am so glad that my mother did not force me to take music lessons. I tried for one awful quarter to play the flute but dropped it, at the school’s suggestion, as soon as I could. I tried day after day and I never got any better. The good thing I got out of that was that must be what if feels like to be dumb but earnest in academic persuits. It gave me insight that a lot of people were obtuse not to annoy me, but because they really were that slow.

I was allowed when we could afford it to do lessons at the YMCA, and did do tumbling, water ballet, swimming through advanced life saving, and even one season of soccer, all because I wanted to at the time.

I am quite glad that I was not forced to commit more time to sports. I spend a lot of my free time drawing, painting, and sculpting and making up stories with my friends as well as reading. I read voraciously from second grade on.

Life is unpleasant enough without forcing unpleasantness, especially as a kid.

There will always be some kids that will indulge in time watching TV or on the computer and work it into something not useless. My parents say they regret getting me my first computer, because I basically spent all my time on the net and didn’t socialize in real life. After about 3 or 4 years, the basic novelty wore off, I concentrated on more information-based Internet stuff (the SDMB, Snopes, news sites, Wikipedia, etc. as opposed to Neopets, MySpace, MMORPGs, etc.) and started tinkering around with web design, and got a set of good real life friends I still have.

Said friends have done the piano lessons, the dancing lessons, the Air Cadets, all those extracurricular activities, while I did almost none (a few casual children’s art classes and ceramics). Guess who got the good summer job that paid well because of the hobbyist computer tinkering, and who got the crappy retail shiftwork?

Sometimes kids who do the lazy looking stuff like sit on the computer, play video games, or watch TV turn out to be the great programmers and TV producers that wouldn’t have gotten there if their parents bought into the claim that TV rots your brain.

Okay, done hijacking! :smiley:

I think that’s a good approach, but it must be flexible to allow for children’s abilities. The music requirement would have been a cinch for me, but sports? It’s not that I’m lazy; I’m just horrible when it comes to physical coordination. I got ridiculed enough for being clumsy at school. It would have been hell to deal with it outside of school too.

Parents shouldn’t get stuck into thinking that any one kind of activity is the magic bullet. Some kids just aren’t sports-oriented or music-oriented or whatever-oriented. I think requiring some kind of extracurricular activity is more important than requiring a specific kind. I say let artistic kids choose art lessons or geeky kids choose geeky activities. And if you think Junior needs to get physically fit, be loose enough so that dance lessons, weight lifting, or aerobics class can also be considered “extracurricular”.

It sounds to me like you’re thinking past your present problem. You don’t need to worry yet about how or if to make him stick with something. First, you need to help him find out what something he might be *interested *in.

Have you taken him to T-Ball, soccer, gymnastics, etc? That is, not signed him up on the team, but taken him multiple times to watch? Let him hang out with the players after the game? Encouraged him to play with you in the front yard? Bring a soccer ball to the park and let him and his friends kick it around? Those are all steps I’d consider to help intrigue him and gauge his interest before plunking down the money for equipment and lessons.

My son and I went to observe his friends at martial arts twice a week for a month before I let him sign up - for the twice a week classes. So he knew the time commitment (minus practice at home, of course) going in. He got to watch a lot, and liked what he saw. He then signed a commitment (mine was the legally binding signature, of course, but his school had a “contract” for him to sign, as well. Good idea, that.) for a year. At various times, he talked about not liking it anymore, and I’d just remind him that he’d made a promise for a year, and that was that. At the end of the year, he decided to re-up, and we did. I think he did it for about four years before he decided it wasn’t his thing anymore.

Violin didn’t go so well. He refused to practice, and the violin was out on a year long lease. I agreed that I couldn’t make him practice, but he then owed me the $30 a month I was shelling out on the violin that collected dust. He worked chores for me to pay for it. I wish he would have stuck with it, but there’s really no way to make someone practice. Oh, you can shut them in their room and listen for the horrific squawk and screech for an hour a day, but if they really don’t want to get better at it, they won’t. But he at least had no orchestra or band to let down by quitting.

Podkayne, your example sounds horrifying, and the two key words in there are “sob” and “beg”. Unless you were a normally hysterical child prone to overdramatics, I’d have let you stop going to swim camp. That’s beyond the usual bored slackerness and distaste for practice that I think everyone experiences at some point or another with an organized hobby.

A friend of mine got enrolled in so many different activities as a child. His mom didn’t want him to just sit around after school and watch TV and play video games and have a bunch of friends visiting, so she kept him busy with 4H, Cub Scouts, skiing lessons, karate lessons, guitar lessons, swimming lessons, etc. I also think she wasn’t really fit to be a mother and enrolled him in all these activities just so someone else could babysit him. I can see wanting to give a child something to do outside of the house (as long as he shows some interest in such activities), but at least allow him some time to do his own things with his own free time and not have to go to different activities every day. Some balance is in order here, and his after-school time was too structured. After awhile the routine became pure drudgery to him. In a lot of cases he didn’t even have a choice. His mother just said, “you’re going whether you like it or not and that’s final, end of story.” After awhile he just didn’t give a shit anymore and ended up hating his mother and loafing around the house after school anyway. I can’t say that any of the things he did as a child have carried over into his adult life, either.