We Are Teaching Kids To Prioritize Sports Over Their Mental & Physical Health.
The sad part is pop culture has fooled you into believing it's "what's best"..
“You know what happens to the plastic trophies nobody cared about to begin with?
They end up in a landfill.
Your body, far more valuable, gets a fancy wooden box.
And we’re going to teach them to prioritize the former over the latter in their most impressionable years?
Interesting.”
-Ray Zingler on X
Sports can be fun.
But sports are temporary, not lasting more than a few hours a day for a few years.
Life can be fun.
And life is forever, lasting every second of every day.
Would it not make more sense to prioritize what is every second of every day forever over something that has an incredibly finite existence?
As always, I am not demonizing sport. I love sports because I believe sports can be some of our youth’s greatest teachers (unfortunately adults are screwing that up more and more).
But to prioritize baseball over nutrition?
Lacrosse over general physical fitness?
Basketball over mental health?
What are we doing?
“That’s not how it is, Ray!”
It’s not?
Our kids eat garbage branded as food that comes from windows.
Kids who can’t skip or do somersaults are going to sport specific lessons.
Kid’s are suffering from mental health crises and burn out at rates we’ve never before seen and your anecdote is shoving pills down their throat to alter their brain chemistry because a doctor is incentivized to collect your bread and a checked out teacher wants them to sit down and shut up?
And we consider that fucking normal because every other kid being conditioned to go the wrong way about all this stuff is doing it too?
Insanity.
It’s time we as adults gets our asses in gear and start living the “big picture” instead of just cheaply throwing the phrase around while displaying actions that are completely counter to it.
Teach kids the importance of food. Real food. Beef, chicken, fish, eggs, potatoes, vegetables, fruit.
Is fast food the devil? Not occasionally, but to pull through a Taco Bell drive thru on the regular? While telling them to “take care of their bodies”? That failure is on you.
You’re starving to get them into another lesson because you want them to beat that kid out because YOUR ego is too big?
Your kid can’t even do hopscotch. And he’s 12.
Do you honestly think endless rushed mornings and late nights are “best” for their mental health?
Stop following the crowd and follow what’s best.
Set them up for the real game, not the pretend one.