Photo by Dave Pidgeon
The man with the red “coach” tee shirt stood about three times the size of my 5-year-old son, hands on his hips, dark sunglasses directed right at my boy. “You gotta trust me, Ryan,” Coach pleaded. “Take a step, swing straight, and it’ll happen.”
My son’s face and demeanor projected the kind of agony one would expect from a child who just found out he will have homework for the next 13 years of his life—eyes turned down, emotionless, shoulders slumped. He either suffered a stroke or in the moment would rather have been scrubbing clean the disgusting Betta fish bowl we have on the living room shelf instead of, you know, receiving instructions. The boy simply wants to swing, run the bases, and, when playing the outfield, combat boredom by turning his hat to the side and waving all four limbs in an ancient, trance-like dance just as the baseball goes sailing overhead.
We have photographic evidence of this jig. It’s really quite something.
He’s of course merely five, and who can blame a child for yearning for fun? As his father, however, resisting the urge to run over to home plate and show him the how-to’s of batting can be so trying that, from time to time, my wife is known to suggest I go sit in the minivan.
When the boy takes another hack at the baseball sitting on top of the tee and connects the barrel of the bat, sending the ball sailing to the shortstop, I can see the grin spread wide across his face as he runs free down the first base line. All I can think is, “Thanks, Coach. We needed that.”
Somewhere in the manual of parenting the hospital maternity wards hand out—they do that, right?—is a section about how to approach teaching your children what they need to know in life. It begins with crawling, followed by the first steps, then how to color with markers between the lines, which leads to instructions on operating a TV remote so you can get some work done around the house, and so on.
What I suspect the manual doesn’t tell us is how teaching and learning is a relationship like a two-way street. You want to teach, but the child not only has to want to learn, he has to want to learn from you.
And so when the prospect of signing our oldest son up for tee-ball blossomed, my wife and I had two conversations. The first one was easy. “You think we should sign Ryan up for tee-ball? I think all his friends are playing,” my wife asked. The quick answer was, “Absolutely.”
The second conversation began with more trepidation. “Would you like to coach?” she asked, and I said I would have to think about it.
I did want to coach. Seeing how our son eagerly jumped at the chance to play tee-ball made me even more enthusiastic about the idea, and visions of 13 years from now flooded into my mind—a golden sun setting, Ryan with eye black smeared on his cheeks, sporting a dirt-covered pinstriped high school uniform and walking next to me, our arms around one another as we exit together off a baseball diamond. “I love you, Dad,” he says to me.
“I love you, too, son,” I respond in this heavenly vision. “There’s someone here to meet you. He’s a professional baseball agent.”
Something in my instinct, however, came at me like a brush back pitch. When our son turned threenager, how he bonded with his mother and me was distinct, not in a terrible way, but he clearly responded more positively to my wife’s gentler and more empathetic approach to parenting. We balance other each with our own styles of parenting, and mine’s a little more firm, a little more stringent.
When my wife asked me again if I wanted to coach our son’s T-ball team, I confessed to her that I did, but I wouldn’t.
“I thought you wanted to,” she said in confusion.
“I do,” I said. “I also want my son to love and admire me as a great man. Best not to put that at risk by doing things like teaching him how to hit and catch. Just playing it safe, here. They call it playing not to lose, and as a strategy, I kinda like it for this.”
What I really want for our son is a diverse team of teachers in his life. All adults have different approaches, different ways of reaching children to inspire and instruct them, and if someone else can do that for him, can inspire him in ways I may not, then the right thing to do is step aside and let the other adult lead.
A fresh set of eyes or, a new voice in his ear, not only can teach him new skills, but it can also reinforce what I had been trying to show the boy in our backyard, but because he’s a little resistant to my methods of teaching, he didn’t want to hear—elbow up, watch the ball hit the bat, step, swing through. Maybe it was because I was the one teaching.
We’re all a team, parents. All of us. Sometimes being part of a team is recognizing when it’s best to step back and take on a supporting role, standing on the sidelines, staying quiet, and letting someone else show your child the how-to’s. It’s worked for us, and we’re about ready to start our second season.
Dave is a Lancaster-based stay-at-home father, writer, and professional photographer.
Read more at CreativelyGenuine.com and follow him on Twitter, Instagram and NorthArch.