On Sunday, we watched the first soccer game of the season. Jonah was on defense, which made him grouchy, because there's no glory in defense. Steve and I gossiped about which boys hit puberty over the winter and eavesdropped on conversations.
One of the kids on Jonah's team is a monster. Only 12, but he's a head above the other boys. He gets his height from his dad, a Russian who intensively yells at his kid on the side line. This time, the grandfather came and took intensity to a whole new level.
Talking in a thick Russian accent, the grandfather ranted about his grandson's performance.
"Look at that boy. LOOK at him. He's afraid of the ball. He's such a big boy and he's afraid of a lEEtle ball. In my day, chEEldren were not afraid of the ball. We were not afraid of the ball, because we were HUNGRY. These kids today get too much butter. They are afraid."
Heather sent me a fun link to an article about a local Easter egg hunt that was cancelled because the helicopter parents were too interfering.
Clearly, the problem with those kids is TOO MUCH BUTTER.
Apt. 11d 
But, helicopter parents “They couldn’t resist getting over the rope to help their kids,” aren’t the same as parents who stand at the sidelines and yell at their kids about “being afraid of the leeetle ball,” are they?
We had a tall kid in our daughter’s class decide he didn’t like basketball because, as he told his mom, “They want me to push people around, mom. And I don’t like to push people.” The mom told me her first reaction was confusion, because as a middle-schooler, she’d gotten to play basketball for the first time, and one of the thrills was that she was allowed to push people around a little. But then, she caught herself, and realized that it was OK with her if she had a big boy who *didn’t* like to push people around.
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I was once out to dinner with a visiting scholar from Russia who told the waitress not to put any cheese in his meal. When I asked him if he was allergic, he said, “Cheese is woman’s food.”
I bet you could get a book out of “parents on the sidelines” without the dignity/boundaries problem for your own children – though it might be hard to avoid anecdotes about people you know.
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Russians are scary, just in general.
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I had a meeting today with somebody who said “variable” just like Chekov would have, but I don’t think he was Russian. Too calm.
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My six year old daughter just finished her first season of soccer – think happy girls bounding around with blond pigtails, stopping to chit chat.
Some of the parents have enrolled their girls in a soccer workshop that starts in April coached by an Eastern European soccer coach. Remember, this is laid back, hippy dippy Vancouver.
This guy is the Bela Karolyi of soccer – apparently his style is to yell at the girls and also reward the winners with candy while the losers get nothing.
So, hippy dippy Vancouver AND these are six year old girls. And his cRaZy workshop is fully booked.
It’s JUST kids’ soccer….
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Russians are scary, just in general.
Now you tell me.
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“I had a meeting today with somebody who said “variable” just like Chekov would have, but I don’t think he was Russian. Too calm.”
I can’t put my finger on what they get wrong, but film/TV Russian accents almost never sound right to me. (Older British shows also have terrible American accents that make no sense at all, geographically speaking.)
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‘Russians are scary, just in general.’
“Now you tell me.”
Eh, you knew that.
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Before I could couch my daughters’ softball teams, I had to take something called the “Rutgers Coaching Clinic” and get their certification card. I assumed it was going to be all about first aid and motivation techniques, but it was actually a really good program about how to be a good coach for elementary-aged kids.
The one thing I got out of it that I still consciously use is what they called the “Sandwich technique” for criticism, where you always sandwich the criticism between two compliments: “You’re looking great out there! You just need to remember not to rest your bat on your shoulder while you’re waiting for the pitch — it’s making you swing to late. Otherwise, your bat speed is looking really good!”
I think between helicopter parents who can never criticize and Russian grandparents who yell curses at their own kids from the sidelines, there’s got to room for actual physical education, with the emphasis of education.
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Eh, you knew that.
Oh yeah, I did study German and Polish history. But somehow that wasn’t as funny an answer.
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the “Sandwich technique” for criticism
Russian literature is a deeply moving window into the human condition. You don’t have to scowl at everybody. Way to take care of the bulk of Hitler’s armies for us.
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Russian literature is a deeply moving window into the human condition.
Yes. We are all multiple people living within a single shell, so we can be called Dmitri, Mitya, Mitka, Mitenka, Mitri, Fyodorovich, or Karamazov, almost randomly, so that the reader has no idea who is being referenced from one sentence to the next.
Latin American literature looks in the opposite window into the other human condition, recognizing how we are all the same person, so you can a dozen characters, all named some version Jose Arcadio Buendia, and the reader still has no idea who is being referenced from one sentence to the next.
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Russians believe that people who smile all the time must be simple-minded. Also (paradoxically), the constantly smiling American is a rather sinister figure. They can’t possibly be that happy–why do they insist on smiling?
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