Sports Parenting

Since I don't ride my bike right now, but parenting never takes a break, lets visit that topic for a second. More and more all the time I'm finding out how hard it is to strike a balance on how hard to push the boys on certain things. Most of our kids activities are sports-related so let's go with that. On the one hand, I refuse to be the beauty pagent mom. I said this to my wife the other day and she got it immediately. There's some useless TV show on MTV or some other crap channel about people dressing their 3 year olds up like little toy dolls and parading them around the country to beauty pagents. These people are dumping 10's of thousands of dollars on coaches and outfits and makeup and all this other bullshit for a 3 year old who is crying that they don't want to do it and doesn't have 2 minutes to sit and play with a ball. If I ever become that parent, shoot me. On the other end of the spectrum you've got the "obesity epidemic" and the generation of professional video game players. Now I remember being a Super Mario shark at one point in my life, but it was typically to unwind from the 3 hours of pond skating. If I ever give in to my boys' preference for watching TV and playing Wii, shoot me for that too. But in between those two is a pretty big frickin range. Do I bring my kid to the AAU tryout because he's got genuine talent even though he says he's not sure if he wants to? Do I let them hone their NHL 2K10 skills for a couple months since they just came off 3 months of football? I'm not sure that I have or will ever have the perfect answer. Maybe I hire the professional beauty coach and tell them they're fired the first time my kid cries. Who knows... it's as much about creating opportunities and preventing the "Man, I wish I had..." as it is letting them be kids and just grow up when it's time to grow up and not when I say they should. Remind me why I signed up for this gig?