Football, Character and Future

Five boys in a local football club, who looked like young teenagers, attacked four children, three of them girls, over a soccer ball.

One of the boys punched a four-year-old girl in the stomach, and another punched a 13-year-old girl on the cast over her broken arm.

The management did nothing about it, saying that the boys had a conflicting version of the story.

And my question is, what are these people teaching the children?

The answer is twofold: Dishonesty and brutality. I can think of nothing more contemptible than punching a four-year-old girl. And, with the adults failing to investigate and believing the wrongdoer, the children are being taught not only that they can get away with violence but also that being dishonest pays.

We of course see similar behaviors in adults all the time. The men who like to beat their wives and rape their children learn how to cover their tracks, and with the techniques that have been pioneered and advertised by the fathers' rights movement they now know how to do so in a way to fool the courts. This behavior is then passed on to the children and teaches the children to likewise practice brutality and dishonesty. Which is what we have here.

One major purpose of children's sports is to teach character. The character that is being encouraged here is the character of a liar and a batterer. And encouraging such a character is destructive to the country and its future. Kids are encouraged to be complete scumbags; and I fear for the future if this is the character that is encouraged and passed along.

In the football culture there appears to be an entrenched idea that football is the only way to be strong and that everything else is for sissies. That encourages violence as well as chauvenism, so that the football kids would attack other children - three of them girls - over a soccer ball. A much smarter lesson, given that the attack was over a soccer ball, would have been to make them play soccer instead of football on the day of the attack in order to teach them respect for things other than football. Which respect is sorely needed for the running of a free society.

Immature predatory behavior, when shown by children, often leads to mature predatory behavior in adults. The tendencies shown by these children must be confronted rather than encouraged. A teenage boy who would punch a four-year-old girl in the stomach, if left uncorrected, would also be a bully as an adult. And that would be bad for his wife, for his children, and for anyone else who has to deal with him.

These kinds of qualities must be confronted before they result in serious suffering on the part of others. The people who run children's sports need to know such things. The purpose of children' sports is not just to teach sports; it also is to teach character. And that requires confronting these kinds of behaviors and steering the children toward a more honorable conduct.