Recently I received a call from a mother
seeking advice. While attending a youth football game in which her son's team
was getting crushed, she overheard another mom repeatedly express frustration
that her own son wasn't playing. As the opposing team scored again, this upset
mom lost it: she stormed down from the bleachers and marched around the field
to where the teams were standing, arriving just as her son went into the game and
was promptly pulled back out again. She grabbed her son and dragged him away so
quickly that the coaches didn't even notice.
The mom who called me recounted her husband's observation at that point: "That's such a mom thing to do," he said. And this mom thought to herself, "What's wrong with that? What's wrong with a 'mom thing to do'?"
On the one hand, she wondered, are moms supposed to just stand by while their kids suffer exclusion or other negative aspects of competitive youth sports? On the other hand, she wondered, what kind of message does a mom send by taking her kid off the field in the middle of a game.
"Mothers do get like mama bears," I told her. "We really do get very protective of our children." But while I recognized this mother's frustration with her son's lack of playing time, I couldn't endorse her actions.
Yet, I told her, a mother's protectiveness is not a bad thing. In fact, what serves mothers so well as sports parents is their natural protectiveness, along with their nurturing instinct, emotional openness, and their belief in the importance of fair play, cooperation, connectedness, inclusiveness and the value of doing one's best over winning and competition.
