Sport - what are we doing to our children?

I was recently going through some of my old paperwork and I pulled out my copies of the QCS tests I took to assist in classifying my overall position when graduating high school back in 1999. I read through these tests I came across my final draft for the Writing Task.

For this task I was presented with a three-page spread of stimulus material and in two hours I had to write a 600 word document in almost any form. In this stimulus material I saw some sporting activities and some comments on tribal societies (if I ever set up my scanner I may add a copy of this stimulus material here in the future).

During school I was always the math and computer guy and writing was definitely not my strong suit. However, I feel I managed to put together a fairly decent argumentative magazine article on the topic of sport and it's relevance in today's society in this pressure-packed two hours of exam fun! It's a topic I still mostly believe in, although I intentionally made this article inflammatory to attempt to polarise and entertain the marker enough so that they may overlook the odd grammatical or spelling error.

So, without further ado, I give you the two-hour ramblings of a 17 year old some 12 years ago (with all original spelling and grammatical errors included as faithfully as possible, although I hope I made some more corrections when transcribing the final version). Oh I wish I got to come back to this a couple of days later an edit it before handing it in however, I guess everyone was in the same situation.

Sport - what are we doing to our children? 

Sport, oh what an incredibly productive activity. From birth we teach our children that the only true heroes in our society are those who participate in sport. It is the sporting events that bring the crowds, sporting heroes who gain incredible amounts of money in sponsorship and children who are forced to believe that to be famous and well-liked they must be good at sport.

What is this fascination we have about sport? Most people argue that we participate in these activities to stay fit and healthy. This is a long way from the truth. Take Gridiron for example. This game consists of very big, heavily padded men who run around a field for three hours (remembering this is a sixty minute game) tackling other men. Is this what we call keeping fit? Is this really what we want to be teaching our children? Aparently so, as parents are usually the ones who push their children into playing these sports.

From birth, the male child is continuously pressed into participating in some for of team sport. This decision is usually made by the child's father and is usually in the form of a sport the father enjoys watching. The parents often take a more active roll in the game than the children themselves: screaming from the sidelines, arguing with the referees and generally pushing their children until they have nothing more to give. This ritual of making a child do something the parent wants them to do is very damaging for the child's developing personality. Rebellious behaviour only occurs because the children finally realise that they don't have to do everything their parents want them to do anymore. They gain control over their own life.

However, this is not where this cycle ends. The rebellious child turns into an adult and, after a few short years, they have a child. Because these new parents choose to forget the reasons for their rebellious stage, the cycle of pressuring their children into playing sport continues.

This ritual like behaviour of parents pressuring their children into believing sport is the only way to win their love stems from tribal times. Earlier in history men, predominately, were the group responsible for catching the meat. They had to be fit, just in order to survive so, they made sure their children were fit also. They made them participate in 'manly' activities to build muscle and fitness so some day they could be the hunters. As humans found less and less need for hunting our food, sport became a popular past-time. Instead of hunting, games were created to expel the extra energy no longer used in hunting and thus leisure-time sport was invented.

Now, in the present, even though we know it is based on stupid ideas, sport is more popular than it ever was before. Almost every weekend, parents all over the world are forcing their children to arise early to go off and participate in contact sports, that have the potential to cause permanent injuries. that affect a person for life [ed: wow… what a long and convoluted start of a paragraph]. These ideas can't possibly be what we want for our future leaders to have. Surely the cycle has to be broken sometime. Why can't that time be now? Sport is destroying the ability of our society to live in peace and harmony together by keeping the aggressive behaviour of tribal men alive in present day children.