Yesterday, during a 1 hour practice the kids got up to bat maybe twice and had minimal catching practice. The instructors spent more time lining them up, praising them profusely and "encouraging" (read: insisting) them to all "cheer for all your friends" that the time for skill-acquisition was reduced to about 20 minutes.
They are not all "friends." This is a group of about 30 kids who barely know each other and have been placed in the same group. And the reality is they probably wouldn't all be friends anyway. This insistence upon everybody being friends is a very unrealistic way to teach children about the world.
Somebody has to be average. Not all kids can be above average in everything they do. Cheering them on and telling them they're great at everything they do merely diminishes true praise when it's given appropriately.
Not all children are "special" in the gifted sense of the word and some kids are sincerely living up to their potential. And there's nothing wrong with that!
In fact, if you look at the Bell Curve of IQ (intelligence quotient) the vast majority of the population falls squarely in the middle.
There are certainly some people above the mean, but there are also people below the mean. If we try to make all of our children be above the mean, all we are doing is shifting the Bell Curve over and creating stressed-out children who will never live up to our expectations.
To go back to T-Ball, the instructors' insistence that all the children be cheered on, assured they were "special" and made to feel good actually ended up costing them the chance to practice skills that might help to make them more competent overall.
So, I ask you this: Are we hurting our children by telling them they can excel at everything?
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