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?
- It is humiliating to be constantly and thoroughly beaten at “your sport” by nine-year-olds when you’re 12.
- Miniature-jock 9-to-11-year-old girls aren’t interested in being friends with a fat, slow, nerdy twelve-year-old.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.