Baseball season is in full swing....

I know we ALL complain about baseball season being rough running from field to field and taking up so much of our time. I am right there with you. Baseball is one of the reasons I am so far behind on my to do list. HOWEVER.....I love it. Not the baseball itself, but how it makes my kids feel. My oldest 2 LOVE it, they eat, sleep & breath baseball during baseball season. Are they the best at it? No. But they feel great about themselves when they are playing. Especially after a good tight game has been played. I feel like self confidence in children in our world today is slipping. We should all as parents do our best to build our children up not tear them down.

But there also is a fine line between supporting your child and pushing them over the line. I sit at the ball games and watch 10 year old children be berated by their parents over a mistake they made on the field. Will that child become a great baseball player because of this treatment? Some do and some don't. But either way these children look miserable. Bottom line is baseball is about fun, not winning at all cost. Over my 9 years of being a baseball mom, my children have been on teams that have won every game. But they have also been on teams that have only won 1 or 2 games a season. They have had great coaches, but they have also had coaches that went way over the line. The best thing we have found works with our boys are the talks on the way home after the game. We tell them what their strenghts were in the game, but we also discuss how to prevent the errors they might have made during the game. We also talk about the way other parents treat their children, or how the coaches acted to other children. We let them know how we feel about it & they talk about they feel about it. My children know when they make a mistake & they feel bad about it. The best thing for them is to be told how to TRY to prevent it from happening again , not yelling at them for letting the mistake happen again. I think this most likely applies to all children.

A good friend of mine, who has children a lot older than mine, once told me that the key to keeping kids out of trouble was being involved in their lives. Do not try to be their best friend, just show interest in what they do and support them in what they love. I have also heard if you keep them busy with activities they don't have time to get in trouble. I am not sure if I could handle keep ALL of them busy ALL of the time. But we put our best foot forward.

I hope that when my kids grow up they can look back at their childhood and know that they were LOVED beyond measure. All of the days and nights of sitting at ball fields in rain, freezing cold, or smoldering hot weather were done out of love. All of the hours of traveling in a cramped car for all stars, all of the take out food they had to scarf down (not that they complain), all of the sun burns that were gotten because mama forgot to put more sunscreen on when we went into over time for the 3RD time and the temps are hovering around 100. ALL of this was done out of LOVE!!!!