Not Making the Team Is Part of Life

Janet Chiauzzi won't be getting any Mother of the Year awards. She's the New York mom who harassed, stalked and accused her son's baseball coach of being a child molester. What would provoke her to do this? Her son didn't make the traveling baseball team. Chiauzzi isn't the first person to go to such extremes when it comes to their child and sports teams. In fact, what Wanda Halloway did might have been much worse.

Holloway hired a hitman to kill a mother of a girl that Holloway's daughter was competing against to make the junior high cheerleading squad. Holloway's reasoning was that the girl would be so distraught over the death of her mother, she wouldn't be able to compete in the tryouts.

Yes, these are extreme cases. But I thinking there are mothers and fathers all over the world who are very disappointed when their child doesn't make a sports team or can't participate in an extra curricular activity. The question is why? Is it because the parents are still upset about the sports team they didn't make and want their children to be better than them? Perhaps, the parents did make the sports team and they want their child to follow in their footsteps. Or maybe they want their child to always be happy and never have to to experience disappointment and rejection.

I am sure these are all possibilities. However, they don't justify such behavior and it is certainly not healthy for the children. Children need to experience disappointment and rejection. It is reality and part of life. If parents protect their children from experiencing these situations, they are only setting them up for a lifetime of unrealistic expectations.