I have a 16-year-old son. I’m in my early 30s (had him very young) and a professional footballer. My son also dreams of becoming a successful footballer (he’s been playing since he was 6), but he’s just… not great. He’s good, but not great - and in this extremely competitive industry you need to be at least great in order to even stand a chance. So I told him, as someone who’s been doing this for a very, very long time & is active in this sphere, that he should find another, more attainable dream. He took it as me not believing in him, but I’m just objective and realistic.
If you’re a pro, then you know coaches.
Coaches who you could engage on friendly terms to say “Hey, can you coach my kid? And if needs be, let him down gently?” - see what they think of his potential, and if they need to be the one to tell him he is unlikely to make it, then it’s going to be easier coming from then than from his own Dad. You get to look like you’re backing him by sending him to “one of the best coaches in the business” and then console him when they deliver the rough news…
Regardless of talent kids should always have a backup plan. What if he broke his leg and couldn’t get back into shape? Shit happens.
This way it will not be such a big deal if he can’t make a football career happen.
I don’t have kids and I don’t know anything about sports. If you continue reading after those disclosures, I’ll offer a perspective anyway, since you put this out to the internet for comment.
There isn’t really a way you could have put this to your son that would be taken well, it’s evidently sensitive for him and despite your intentions it’ll feel like a tragic monent. It’s just hard news. Whether it’s right to break that to him, well I’m not sure but I think maybe you’re putting too much emphasis on this one interaction like it was your one shot and there was a definitive right it wrong way to do it. What will matter most is more likely to be what you do generally moving forward. You may have your doubts about his ability in his chosen path and perhaps they’re well founded but you can still encourage him and be rooting for him whilst gently suggesting having backup options in times when he appears uncertain. If you consistently do all you can to help in whatever way you can with whatever choices he makes, then if they don’t work out and he has to abandon that dream, he’ll at least know you supported him all throughout despite your concern and that should count for a lot. If somehow he ends up unexpectedly rocketing to success in football he’ll also remember you’d been there all along encouraging and assisting. It’s ok to counsel against putting his eggs all in one basket, but just don’t push it, you must respect his choice whatever it ends up being and he there to help pick up the pieces if those choices don’t make him happy.
Much like with football fans, you support your team by just showing up to every match and cheering on. Perhaps he didn’t like the uncomfortable dose of reality today but so long as you are consistently a positive and helpful force he’ll hopefully come to appreciate what you’ve been trying to do for him.
You should have known that there was nothing to gain by telling him what you did. Kids that age are smart enough to realize that if they aren’t being selected to the local all-star team, it’s because they’re not an all-star. If they go to football camp and they aren’t one of the best people at the camp, they’ll realize that they’re not very likely to go pro. But you decided to make it your business at a time when you didn’t need to, and that makes you a jerk.
You said that you’re just being objective and realistic, right, but you decided to tell your son your opinion, and not someone else. If you were actually trying to be objective, you would have told everyone on the team what you thought about their potential. Of course that would be really rude, which is the point.
What you could have done is what many other people have mentioned in the comments. Something about how there’s no guarantee that anyone can make it pro, or how long they’ll last if they do, because random injuries can end your career, and the median length of a professional footballer isn’t very long anyway, so there’s still the rest of life to live.
Did he ask for your opinion?
I’d tell him that it’s good to pursue his dreams, but that it’s also good to have a plan B. If he wants to do the sportsball in college, he should also come up with another thing or even two to get into. That’s my opinion, anyway.
I don’t think you’re a jerk, but I think you’ve handled this badly and you’re using ‘objective and realistic’ to justify it, but that’s just code for not believing in him. Were you great at 16? Or were you merely good enough to get signed and thus benefit from decades of training and coaching that improved you? Do you not believe he will also improve? That’s literally what not believing in him means.
It’s one thing to inject some realism, to manage expectations, to encourage him to have a fallback, etc, and quite another to effectively say ‘You’re shit at this so you should just go get a job’ or whatever.
When you punish a person for dreaming his dream, don’t expect him to thank our forgive you.
He’s right, you don’t believe in him, and if he’s not great at football even though he’s living with a pro, that shows me how little you value him. He could be great but what are you doing to help him get there besides crushing his dreams?
If you want to salvage this relationship at all you need to apologize and do everything you can to support him. Training, encouragement, the works.
It’s better that he tries to achieve his dream and have to do something else than to have it crushed out of him by his own father.
if he’s not great at football even though he’s living with a pro, that shows me how little you value him.
Some people simple don’t have the ability to be good at some things, no matter how hard they work at it, no matter who mentors them. Very, very few people have the ability to be a Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart regardless of what kind of mentorship they have.
Let me give you a concrete example.
I’ve had a major shoulder surgery after tearing the shit out of my supraspinatus and the labrum. The supraspinatus passes through the acromium process on the scapula. The acromium process has roughly three different shapes, which are largely determined by genetics. A type I acromium process is smooth, and allows the spuraspinatus to pass through easily. Type II and type III acromium processes have pronounced ‘hook’ shapes–type III significantly more so–that make injury to the supraspinatus much more probable. I have a type II acromium process. Had Mary Lou Retton been my mother and coach, and I’d tried to be a gymnast, I would have destroyed both of my shoulders long before I was ever going to be going to nation-level events; the limits of the shape of my scapula would have made success impossible, given that a strong and stable shoulder is required in gymnastics, regardless of sex/gender. I would likewise be unable to be a competitive powerlifter, for much the same reason; working up to a nationally competitive snatch would have also destroyed my shoulders. (And, in point of fact, it was working on push-presses that killed it.)
People are not a tabula rasa, only needing the proper encouragement to become paragons in a given field.
You are suffering from several fallacies.
- “Unless you can be the best, it’s not worth trying”
Fortunately, the world doesn’t operate this way. There are people who are mediocre, and sometimes poor, at playing football professionally or other professions. Your line of thinking would lead to only one person playing football at a time, the person who is the best at it, and everyone else should give up.
- “Meritocracy is real and the only determining factor of success”
While meritocracy is a nice thought, that the best inevitably rise to the top, it’s not necessarily true. Just as there’s circumstances that keep talent from succeeding, like financial background, biases against people, and luck, those things also can lift up the less talented. There’s many celebrities that aren’t as talented at acting as someone stuck in a small town.
- “I trust OP’s assessment”
As far as you know, op could be wrong. Maybe the kid plays great and OP is too critical, you don’t know. This could be a critical mistake on OP’s end, and making the kid give up doesn’t help regardless.
- “hard work doesn’t mean success, innate ability is the only thing that matters”
If this were true, no one would need to practice anything. You said Mozart succeeded because of his mentoring, but then argue for people having lack of natural talent leading to failure.
- “my back story is relevant”
It was also tempting to throw in the argument of verbosity. But your shoulder injury, or that some people are incapable of physically doing things, isn’t relevant. The kid is physically capable of playing football. It’s a false equivalence.
- “the kid will have the same level of ability at 16 forever”
You presume that this kid will only have the ability he is at, and that even with training, won’t get better. This ties into your belief in natural talent a bit, but it’s still pretty foolish to assume professional football players play at the level they did at 16, so it’s also foolish to assume that 16 is where this kid will peak.
- “the kid achieving the dream is the most important thing here”
This is where you missed the the bigger picture. There’s more on the line than just success at football, there’s a whole relationship at stake, and a kid’s mental and emotional health.
So that all said, look at it this way. There’s four scenarios that could’ve taken place, with four factors. Kid gets encouraged, let’s shorthand that to E. Kid gets discouraged, D. Kid succeeds at professional football, S. Kid fails at professional football, F.
ES is obviously the best. Kid gets support, becomes professional football player, everyone’s happy.
EF is disappointing, but salvageable. The kid gets the attitude of not giving up and at least Dad has his back. Maybe he tries something else after not making the cut, and has a great career at something he’s able to do, but at least he tried. He’s not going to be able to try forever, but he can at least try something new with a solid foundation.
DS is a tragic hero. Kid gets there but doesn’t have a great relationship with Dad. Success is tainted by bitterness, and every win is to prove Dad wrong. Doesn’t have a great relationship with Dad, and probably has a lasting issue because of it.
DF is the worst possible outcome, and at this point it’s the most likely. Kid has an even worse issue with Dad, dreams are crushed, and he grows up bitter and resentful. He’s taught to not try for anything he’s interested in, and lives a life of miserable mediocrity.
It’s my opinion that it’s better for parents to encourage their children in their dreams, because the success rate is probably higher and at the very least they get the support they need to try something different. It’s almost never a great idea to discourage a child because that leads to resentment and lethargy.
You aren’t saving anyone by telling them to give up. That’s a decision they should make on their own. This is even more true for a child who is still developing who they are and how they see the world.
You’re making a ton of straw-man arguments.
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You don’t have to be the best. You do have to be good enough to get scouted by a professional team if your goal is to play professionally. I never at any point said that it wasn’t worth playing if you couldn’t be the best or do it professionally. I spend a lot of time shooting competitively; it’s likely that I will never make Master or Grandmaster in anything, and as a result I’m never going to be sponsored or be able to earn a living at it. (…Not that the money is very good anyways.) So what? I still have fun.
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In sports, playing professionally is a meritocracy. Socioeconomic class matters insofar as having more wealth and privilege means that you’ll have access to better training prior to becoming a professional. But the child in question already has access to training, through a parent that plays professionally. But that’s all the farther that socioeconomic class gets you in sports. People from poorer backgrounds often get to go far in sports, if they have the skill.
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Yes, OP could be wrong. On the other hand, OP is claiming to be a professional in the field, and is therefore more likely to have an informed opinion.
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Success is a combination of directed effort, an inherent capability; it’s not one or the other. If you lack certain inherent capabilities, then all the directed effort in the world won’t get you where you want to be. You can have all the gifts to achieve greatness in a given field, and yet fail completely if you don’t carefully direct your ability in that area.
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See above. The kid already has access to top-tier training, and is not making the grade necessary to perform at a professional level. Ergo, the part that is lacking is capability. …Which is why my anecdote is relevant; it’s not my unwillingness to work my ass off that has limited my power lifting aspirations, it’s my physical capabilities. (And yes, I really did work at power lifting. And will again once my shoulder finished healing, even though I’m never going to be competitive at any level.)
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Of course the kid isn’t going to be at the same level forever. But he’s not on track to be at a level where he’s capable of playing professionally. A 16yo that’s capable of going pro–esp. when they have access to high-level training–would be expected to be performing at a certain level. According to OP, he isn’t. The probability is that, while he will continue to improve (up until age catches up with him), he is not going to be at a professional level in time to make a career of it.
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You’re drawing a false dichotomy between being honest/realistic with your children, and having a relationship with them. I’m gathering, from what you’re saying, that you don’t believe that the parent should give their child a realistic assessment of their performance, and should simply be encouraging; it that correct? It seem like you believe that putting all of your effort into a goal, and failing to achieve that goal would not cause deep bitterness on its own; am I reading that correctly?
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“It’s my opinion that it’s better for parents to encourage their children in their dreams […]” I partially disagree. I think that parents need to encourage children to set realistic goals in life, and goals that can be stretch goals. Maybe that looks like going to school to become a biologist, and going on to medical school if biology ends up being fairly easy for them. Maybe that looks like going into a trade if they’re good at working with their hands. Playing professional sports–or being a touring musician that makes enough to live on, etc.–is like winning a jackpot in the lottery. Sure, you gotta play in order to win, but for every person that wins there’s millions of people that don’t. I would hope that you would say that anyone planning for retirement by buying lottery tickets was a fool, even if that person was your child. But even so, you can play sport for fun.
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This is incredibly bad advice
How? You’re saying it’s better to tell your kid their dreams suck and they shouldn’t try? What a great parenting strategy.
If he doesn’t have what it takes, and he keeps encouraging him to go for that anyway, then he’d be encouraging his son to live in a fantasy world until he gets mowed down by the real one. That would not be a favor to his son. It would be a failure in his duty to prepare him for adult life.
As a pro, you know better than most that any professional athlete should always have a back up plan. Pursuing academics, degrees, and skilled trades alongside the sport is critical for the very real possibility of a career ending injury.
Emphasizing that to your son alongside his play is an easy right move to make. At some point, if his skill doesn’t improve, he will naturally stop advancing in ranks. The reality will take care of itself, and as a father, the emphasis you imparted about other professional avenues will bear fruit without having to deflate anyone.
Is he good enough to be a coach? Or a trainer? Or work in sports tech? Media?
Maybe he can find a way to be invoked without being locked in on being a player on the field at the top level. If what he loves is the game, he can be a part of making the game better or safer or reach more people.
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at 9 my mother called me stupid and that I wouldn’t go far unless I tried harder
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at 12 a teacher told me that I wouldn’t amount to much because I was a loser
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at 15 my father gave up on me and stopped trying to teach me anything and just yelled at me everyday calling me worthless
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at 20 I left home and moved in with a batshit crazy girl, became homeless on my 21st bday.
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I moved back home. got called a failure, a lot.
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got another job. they trained me. they supported me.
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met a girl, she believed in me, supported me
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moved out together, went to college.
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got a degree, and a job
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got married, had kids
I now make six figures. own a large house. very successful, mostly happy(state of the world concerns me).
I tell you this as someone who has been told “the truth”.
To a kid, what their parents think of them means everything. they see you as the example, not only, but a hero as well.
what you just did broke the image they had of you. you’re not the hero anymore. you’re just like every other obstacle they see every single day.
as a parent you must support your child, but you can be creative with it. share their hobby with them, start a new one with them, talk to them about what their backup plans. use your own life experience to help guide them to a decision of their own.
brutal honesty gets you two things
- ignored
- resented
apologize to your kid. you want to share some brutal honesty with them? share how big of a fucking moron you are with them. share how hard you try to be a good loving parent but still make mistakes.
be vulnerable with your child, because you stripped away their armor and now they feel vulnerable around you.
only then can you move past this and help guide them to where they want to be.
I didn’t have this life trajectory, but I have another experience and don’t really agree with this. My parents have always been loving and supporting of me. They saw me majoring in science and encouraged me. Once or twice my dad told me he thought I’d be a good audio engineer, but I never really took him seriously.
Well I probably wasn’t cut out to be a STEM worker, or at least I haven’t figured it out yet and I’m getting pretty old. Just working dead end jobs and being too anxious to try for better jobs.
Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I listened to my dad a little better, or if anyone had been able to tell me while I was struggling in my stem classes, that maybe I was aiming at the wrong thing, and to keep looking…
There’s no way your dad could have known what was going to happen. There’s no way people around you could have known that you were in a career path that wasn’t going to work out well for you. Nobody can guarantee the future like that.
The other thing is that even if you’re working in STEM, to follow up with your example, there are thousands of different jobs that all feel totally different to people working them. It’s quite possible that you could initially hate the field, then make some lateral shift, and find a position that is halfway decent. Here again, nobody knows what’s going to be good for you.
If you want responsible career advice, it’s quite simple. Because there aren’t guarantees, you might want to develop several different skill sets, so that you’re in a better position to deal with unknown future changes. If you think you can learn how to do one simple thing and then have 45 years of happiness doing it, flip a coin and hope luck is on your side.
I’m sorry, but the irony of not becoming an audio engineer because you didn’t listen is really something.
Hehe that is pretty funny thanks for that :p
speaking as a parent this is one of my worst fears. I want to help support my kids in whatever drives them. I know though, at some point that my kids will make their own decisions that have their own life changing repercussions. the best I can do is impart my own wisdom on them early to allow them to make better decisions when that time comes.
I’ll impart some of my own worldly knowledge on you if you don’t mind. You’re never too old to do what you want to do. it won’t be easy, but nothing that makes your life better ever is. I was in my 30s once I turned my life around. I’ll never be where I wanted to be, but I’m a lot further than I would have been had I never tried. find what you’re good at and drives you and don’t ever be ashamed of wherever that leads you. to thine own self be true.
I’m sorry that you didn’t get the support you needed, but as an adult remember, our parents are only human and make mistakes too. this doesn’t mean what they did was acceptable, but rather allows you to acknowledge the actions and move on from them.
I accepted my father some years after his death, and have acknowledged my mother’s shortcomings. what has driven me to that point is my own failings as a parent. I realized that I was making the same mistakes they were just by trying to not become them. my goal as a parent was literally “don’t be like mom or dad”. now, my goal is “be the dad my kids need”.
They don’t always get what they want, but I’m always willing to listen if it’s important enough to them. I love my kids, would do anything for them if it’s in their self-interest. I hope they look back as adults and realize that so they don’t have to waste years on battling the same demons I had.
thanks for sharing.
This is a life at stake. Don’t tell this guy to be a pushover to spare a feeling. It’s way WAY worse to fuck a whole life thinking you’ve got a career that your parents know something about when you DONT.
This is a shitty, entitled take. Some people are good at some things. Some are good at others. Don’t gaslight your kid to think he’s an astronaut and let the world teach a lesson. That makes you a SHIT parent.
You know who makes 6 figures? A fucking lot of people. Cool, good on you, you’re not a unicorn.
Life at stake?
Eh no, not knowing that you should have a backup plan if you want to do stuff like football is far from ruining a whole life.
Let’s say that they figure out that football is a no go at 25 or something ridiculous like that, what happens? Nothing. They can just do something else, they can even study and get some good education if they want. Switching careers isn’t impossible like you make it out to be. Hell, depending on where you live you might even get paid by the government to get a better education.
Let the kid do football but encourage them to do other stuff too (like getting a good education).
I see we’re using the big dictionary today. words like gaslight and astronaut. I bet you were even excited to use the word unicorn.
feel like you cut me down a few notches? put me in my place, did you?
got news for you, you’re going to need to try a lot harder than that to cut me down.
your attempt was pathetic tbh. 20 years of mental abuse killed something inside me that makes people like you weak and forgettable.
I found my strength, can you say the same?
Guy says to not tear down people. Then tears down people.
what a shitty take.
I shared a part of myself to the community. then got called shitty and entitled.
fuck you, dick.
Generalized animosity from a parent to their child is the not the same as seeing a niche interest that most likely won’t work out based on facts.
You’re giving survivorship bias for two completely different situations. He’s not telling his kid he can’t do anything. He’s being very specific, and that specific thing is also already very difficult to obtain for anybody, let alone those with great skills.
And you’re saying the lessons from one thing aren’t directly applicable to the other when they are. It’s like saying no one who was ever physically abused as a child can ever talk about why hitting a child is bad because they’re just giving survivorship bias for two completely different situations. The lack of belief still hurts whether it’s an isolated incident or a pattern, and OP needs to know that.
You’re right, I am saying it’s not directly applicable.
You can use parts of it to make an example, but that’s not what they did. They basically said you’ve ruined the relationship because that’s what they experienced their whole like till they met their partner.
unfortunately I didn’t mean for it to be read that way.
from ages 9-20 I was in a world where I was berated and called a failure because I was never shown how to apply myself. their form of “tough love” and “brutal honesty” only alienated me further from success.
they never once taught me HOW to apply myself and only pushed me deeper into a hole where I truly believed it was impossible for me to apply myself because I was “just a failure anyway”.
Once I received the support on how I could apply myself successfully, I was able to discern a path forward for myself and my future. when I met my gf at the time she was truly remarkable and supported me more than I could ever imagine. she’s the one who talked me into going to college.
unsolicited “brutal honesty” is akin to emotional and verbal abuse in my opinion because, to the victim, it is indiscernible. the outcome is the same, damage to motivations and a remodeling of perceptions of a foundationally important character in your life.
I loved my mother unconditionally until I was 9. when she called me stupid, I have no remembrance of what it was over, nor what transpired after. All I remember is realizing that the bond and love we shared(so I thought) was circumstantial and based on how intelligent I was in her eyes.
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Years ago I met Bernard King a guy who was capable of shutting down Michael Jordan in college and in the NBA for a bit. King blew out his ACL and had addiction issues. When I asked him if he had advice for a 21 year old kid it was “make sure you get a degree because even if you make it to the big leagues you might not stay and you’ll need that education”. Your advice isnt terribly different.
Get one of your professional contacts to honestly evaluate him.
You can’t objectively evaluate him since he’s your kid, and any advice he hears from you will be subject to scrutiny since you’re his parent.
If you’re right then your message will be more believable from a third party, and if you’re wrong then they will hopefully catch that.
Either way, you are right to try to set him up for success; that’s your job as his parent.
I love this idea.
“You know i believe in you but i also believe that bad luck can strike anytime. I have seen it myself, one bad tackle and you are done. I have to insist for you to have a back up plan.”
Eh, yeah, a bit of a jerk.
It’s not the facts that matter, it’s how you deliver them. If you don’t focus on what the kid doesn’t have, and focus on what they’d have to do to make it, you’d get the same thing done.
If you add in that they’re expected, while still under your responsibility, to also work towards a secondary goal that’s within reach without needing a ton of luck on top of talent, you set them up to both work on their dream and have a realistic fallback plan.
Doesn’t really matter what it is, when the kid’s dream is one that they can’t make it purely by working at it, it’s our job to prepare them for the possibility of success, no matter how unlikely, as well as presenting reality.
I partially raised a nephew years ago. He wanted to be a musician or a pro skater. Talented in both (more as a musician), but both of those fields take more than ability to make work. Even skating, which isn’t mostly about who you know and what contacts you can make, you gotta bust your ass every single day practicing like a pro does, and start competing. I explained all that, showed him how to find information for himself, and said he still had to make school his first priority until he was an adult.
Well, turns out he didn’t actually like competing, so skating went to the wayside a year or so later.
He started focusing more on music, and started doing small shows here and there, and liked it. But he did hit that wall where you have to not just hustle, but have the right contacts, or make them. So he switched gears like a lot of creative sorts do and got a job he thought might be interesting in the short term while he worked at music as a secondary.
He ended up enjoying that job enough that he decided to do music more as a hobby. Still does. He still skates too, and he’s almost in his thirties now. He’s also starting his own business in the industry he liked, and went to school to get a basic business degree per my advice.
You don’t have to ride their ass, or insist that they abandon a dream. You just have to give them the best advice you can, and let them do their thing as long as they’re meeting core necessities along the way.
It’s even perfectly fine to tell them that there’s limits to what you’ll do and provide while they chase a dream; support doesn’t mean you have to let them stay in the basement with no actual source of self support on a practical level. It just means that you give them the room to get there if they can while also navigating regular life.
Hell, it’s perfectly fine to be blunt about their chances of making it at whatever. Telling your kid that he’d have to reach a level of skill that would take more work than realistically possible is fine. Telling him that he’s got an incredibly long and impractical road ahead of him if he decides to try is fine. And it’s definitely fine to say that he’s got to do it on his own merits, without any nepotism or favors involved. You can even give an honest evaluation of his skills and athleticism, though you gotta be gentle with that.
What never works is telling than that they can’t, that it’s utterly out of the question and you’ll never have their back. That’s a recipe for a kid you never get to see as an adult.
Shit, man, who says you’re even right? Get some outside opinions on the kid’s skills if you’re going to play the heavy and be sure you’re right.
This was a long, but great read. Listen to this man. I have had similar experiences and outcomes, though not nearly as deep as the OP above me.
!lemmysilver
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