Soccer Blues
Soccer has always been something my kids dabbled in since they were really young. My 6 year old daughter E hasn’t really kept up with it since she was not liking to scrimmage, but my 4 year old son C has been in soccer activities for a while. He also doesn’t quite like scrimmaging, he loves learning the skills and playing the games.
Recently though, C has been saying he doesn’t like soccer. It was after the long winter break where there wasn’t soccer sessions and all of a sudden they started back up. My wife was digging into it more and it turns out he was feeling blue about not being able to keep up with the other boys. My wife gave him a pep talk last week and it seemed to set his head straight about just being persistent. I also felt like he should understand more of the perspective on why it may seem the other boys were better - it was because they were much older than him and also playing soccer for much longer.
When I had C alone on a car ride, I had to explain the perspective to him that he was the youngest boy in soccer. The other boys were already 5 and 6, which meant they were much more experienced and also much older than him. C didn’t know that and was surprised. I told him his coach wanted him to improve much quicker and made an exception to have him join the league that we were in a few months ago along with this soccer session we are currently in. He wants C to play with the older boys to sharpen his skills faster.
I think after giving C more perspective, he realized it was because his coach believed in him that he was still good at soccer. It was just that he wasn’t scoring goals and couldn’t get enough touches on the ball that were getting him down. I told him to continue being persistent and trying his best. That’s all you can do and all you can control. Don’t worry about the rest of it. He nodded and set a goal to get more touches on the ball this past weekend. He also wanted his Mommy to go with him, so my wife had to drag herself outside to cheer him on. I was told he did try really hard to get some touches and it seemed like both the pep talks and setting the right perspective helped. Hopefully this trend will continue.
