A few years back, we started the boy on his martial arts lessons. I say a few years… I guess it would be a bit over 3 years now. As it stands, he’s well on his way to earning a junior black belt, an interim belt level that pre-teen kids can earn at the school. The instructors very rarely award full black belts to pre-teen kids because the curriculum is much more advanced and challenging, including self-defense techniques against weapons. The boy is at the point now in his training where he’s looking forward to classes and practice and even voluntarily practices outside of class.
It was not always so.
In fact, when he first started out there were many a tearful day where he didn’t want to go. He was too tired he’d say, or he just didn’t feel like it. It wasn’t infrequent that he claimed he didn’t like martial arts.
Yet the Wife and I persisted and struggled with him and kept getting him to his classes. Often times, when he put up the biggest stinks about going, he would get into class and clearly enjoy himself. Just as often, when the class ended he’d quickly change to a grousing demeanor. But if we asked him if he’d enjoyed the class, he would begrudgingly admit he had. So we continued to push him along.
We were always on the lookout for a point where it was clear he was not enjoying the classes. Had it become clearly evident, I like to think we would have ceased making him go to fulfill his obligations.
When he was in 1st grade, the boy was involved in something all year long. He started with Scouts and martial arts in the fall. Then moved on to hockey through the Winter. Finally, he concluded with baseball in the Spring. By the end of the Spring, he was doing something all but one day of the week.
I’ll never forget the night he came home with about 2 weeks to go in the baseball season and basically cried uncle. At that point, he had a coach pitch game to attend and he flat out didn’t want to do it. He lamented “I never have any time to do anything I want because I’m always doing either karate, baseball or Scouts.”
That was the last year he played organized baseball. We’ve offered to let him do it every year since. Every year since, he’s declined. He underwent a similar trajectory with soccer. After having played in the Fall leagues for the past couple of years, he chose to stop this year and the Wife and I let him.
It’s hard for me to say what the difference is between karate and baseball and soccer in this context. I suppose part of it is, at the time, he had more invested in karate (even if he couldn’t understand that). Another part of it is, frankly, I’m not a baseball or soccer guy so I wasn’t going to be heart broken about him not wanting to play.
But another part is that he was, and is, still young. So how hard were we going to push him to be doing things and going places and committing himself to activities if he really didn’t want to be doing them? On the one hand, we want to instill in him the need to work and practice to hone and develop skills so he can be accomplished at a skill. In that consideration, allowing him to quit seems counter productive. On the other hand, why run the risk of burning him out when he still has so much mental and physical growth to undergo?
Where are the lines drawn? And how much do we let him draw them?
The Wife and I both only have our own experiences growing up to inform our choices: the things we like and the things we didn’t like. But still, that experience is of limited utility because our kids are not us and we are not our parents. Parallels and patterns may present themselves, but there are no rules, no hard and fast lessons to be applied.
Ultimately, we’ve tried to walk a balance. We try encourage and push him in things that we think are important. We try and instill a sense of drive and obligation to complete a task that isn’t easily completed with those things. And we give him options for things to explore and pursue so that he might eventually find something he is truly passionate about.
I have my doubts that he’ll become a lifelong martial artist and I have my doubts that he’ll want to become an Eagle Scout. But I like to think that when he finally does find a passion, he’ll know how to go about fulfilling it.