Adults are just breeding it out of them.
“We are a species who evolved walking dozens of miles per day without shoes, hunting for shelter, food, and water.
And today some people are concerned that their 12-year-old doing some rows and lunges in addition to youth sports in the summertime is going to be ‘too much.’
-Ray Zingler on Twitter
I get it. Kid’s have a lot going on. They are busy. They are tired. They have a lot of things competing for their time.
But are kid’s really as fragile as we make them out to be?
Can they really not handle an “extra work out” or going to the pool to “swim before practice?”
“Be careful, we want to make sure you don’t zap you’re energy, sweetie?”
Huh?
You mean the human being who evolved from traveling great distances without proper clothes or footwear, over rough terrain in extreme temperatures to (possibly) hydrate and nourish themselves by way of finding a river or killing an animal with a sharp stick?
The above were our ancestors and our 15-year old’s need a mobility/stretching specialist because their back hurts from playing children’s games?
This isn’t a toughen up buttercup, post, but come on.
What are we teaching our kids?
By trying to micromanage everything in their lives we are actually breeding resilience out of them.
We think we are “helping” them, by sheltering them from everything under the sun, (literally, we rub chemicals on them to shield them from the giver of life) but in reality, we are destroying their robustness with each and every sheltering act.
Hell, kids don’t even go outside and play anymore.
They aren’t playing tag, manhunt, or capture the flag, either.
They are sitting on screens comparing themselves to fake realities which further destroys their confidence and increases the severity of their inferiority complex.
The fact of the matter is that we have to let kids be kids and in order to do that, we have to take a step back. We have to go the other way.
Let them skin their knees skateboarding.
Let them get sun burnt.
Have them move that pile of mulch before practice.
God forbid, they don’t need a (heavily) adjusted work out because they are tired from practice.
They’re fine. They are far tougher than what the modern world makes them out to be, but we have to show them that.
The human body adapts or it dies.
That’s how it works.
Remember that each time you shield them from something that yields favorable adaptations. You’re taking points off of their “life scoreboard” every time.
