article on the ReSet generation by WI Coach

I guess I turned it political...sorry about that..so I will stay away from the politics...The OP said he was having trouble getting kids out so he was pinning the blame on the kids and maybe ther parents....I say look in the mirror..we live in the richest largest county in the USA...these kids have every toy and every advantage..There were two kids in our county to turn down FULL SCHOLARSHIPS because they "didn't "like" the schools that offered them (not kidding).our school are 1500-1800 in enrollment.. our teams regularly have 50+ frosh on their squads, some don't however and much of that can be blamed for demographics, they do have good soccer teams so their are boys going out for sports just not football...

$10.96 is the going rate on Amazon.

www.amazon.com/Generation-iY-Chance-Their-Future/dp/0578063557

Should be required reading for anybody who works with kids today.

One of my favorite quotes about "kids today" -

The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.

Just so happens it was written about 2400 years ago by a dude named Socrates.

I agree with the post about getting kids away from the helicopter parent and believe that kids actually crave discipline. They want to know what is expected of them, what the consequences are if expectations are not met, and that the aforementioned will be handled consistently and fairly.

Nice. But no mention of the world around them changing rapidly. Socrates didn't grow up with an iPod, Playstation 3, or X Box 360 nor did the kids he's describing. Things are most certainly different.

Kids were clearly the same way back then as they are now. However, the environment around them from 2400 years ago, heck 10 or even 5 years ago, are vastly different.

That's the issue. It's the nurture NOT the nature in question. Kids will be kids and they will be kids for the rest of time. But will the environment around them continue to change them in ways we could have never imagined? Only time will tell.



You can't just get them away from their parents. Sure you have them for the time you have them, but even if they are out with your program all four years, we're talking 4 years for us against 17 years for their parents. Getting kids away from the helicopter parent will never be an option. So how do we go about being effective without that as an option? That is the question.

My Sr Drill Instructor once said " The end of the USA will happen the day the USMC cannot make its enlistment numbers" The USMC has never not made its recruit numbers even in the middle of the Iraq war when the Army was not making them.

with gen iY, I am sure there will come that day.

davishfc,
You bring up a good point. The young people of today need so many things and parents are putting the weight on coaches and educators. However, you bring up a great point when the parent has double digit years and we have 4 or less and they expect us to fix the problems they have tolerated for so long and/or don't want to be bothered with. Then have the audacity to say you are the problem for the child not meeting expectations when they do not want to parent, discipline, or help with the education of the child.

parents blaming coaches
teachers blaming parents
administrators blaming teachers


and we wonder what the hell is wrong with the kids?



WHY should kids invest in hard work and greater goals of the group? Do you see anywhere in our society where those types of people aren't getting screwed over?

THAT is the real challenge. Coaching is infinitely more of a challenge nowadays, particularly in football. We have more of a burden to create a compelling environment. It is what it is.

It's a complex problem that doesn't necessarily have one or even several guaranteed solutions. I'll give you a synopsis of the author's suggestions but that will take some time. It's not going to happen until I'm at home tonight because we're talking 15 pages of material. But I will share them because some are obvious and others it really takes a true understanding of the generation to comprehend why they would be solutions.

when you think about boys today are really cowards in many ways. In my day (middle 1980s) a boy had to man up and ask a girl out. Heck, just going up and talking to the pretty girl is school took courage.
If you called a girl at her house you got a parent most likely. When you went to pick them up for a date you had to meet the parents.

Now boys ask girls out via text messaging, communicate via text messaging and break up via text messaging. The cowardly lion in the wizard of oz had more courage.

The txt message relationship has virtually cut the parents right out of the process.

there are days were i wish an electromagnetic pulse weapon was detonated sending us back about 100 years in time as our electronics would be very limited. Hey, i have to 1970s muscle cars with carbs on them. I will be able to drive.

This is a demographic, economic, and cultural problem. It goes beyond "these kids and their facebook, Xbox, and iPads, thinking it'll always be handed to them..." Our country is rotting at the core and as the middle class is shrinking, with more parents working longer hours for lower pay just to make ends meet, it sets off a domino effect that erodes the foundations of our society. We're only seeing the tip of the iceberg on where this is going.

I'm at a rural school that's about 70% free lunch and would be higher if more people would just turn in the d@mn forms. Until a few years ago, when admin made it almost impossible NOT to graduate, we only had a graduation rate in the low 70s. This whole community, from top to bottom, struggles with poverty and all the hopelessness, complacency, and cynicism that breeds.

In the classroom, I get the lowest performing students from that population. My kids haven't been "overprotected." They've been thrown to the wolves and had to learn from a very young age how to protect themselves with cynicism and a very narrow comfort zone they dare not stray out of. In one semester, I've had 2 kids run away from home (one had parents who waited 5 days to report him missing). I have a 17 year old freshman girl who has an 8 month old daughter by a guy who molested her, with parental consent, since she was 17. I've had 3 different sets of girls take out restraining orders against classmates. I've had a half dozen kids pulled from their parents due to neglect, drugs, or abuse. A lot of my kids don't even know one of their parents, or they are being raised by grandparents while mom is strung out on pills somewhere across town and dad has been MIA since they were toddlers.

This is the culture we have. Parents are overworked and overstressed. Many of them, growing up in bad homes like this, are unwittingly repeating those patterns at home with their own kids. The stress, loneliness, and lack of traditional supports like spouses, family, church and community organizations puts stretches them to the breaking point and erodes their mental health, which in turn gets passed on to the kids. When mom gets in from work, assuming she's sober enough to do anything besides pass out, all she feels the energy to do is throw some junk food in the microwave and veg out in front of the tv. Who cares about homework? She remembers those teachers making her feel small or harping on a bunch of B.S. she didn't care about. Why should her kid be any different, and besides, who has the time or energy to deal with that crap?

From what they see every day, kids learn early on that hard work doesn't necessarily get you ahead, from the media they learn that impossible standards of perfection are the measuring stick for everyone, among their peers they see that cheating and cutting corners can work, from their parents they learn that the world is a hostile place full of people who just want to scam you for their own ends, and they often see people do the right thing only to get labeled wimps or get screwed over in the end. Why should kids want to try?

We really are all about results in this country, but we look at it as solely being about wins/losses, rather than HOW you win or lose or what the difference is. Why should they want to try harder in the classroom when a D- student and an A+ student both get the same diploma? Why bust their tails in the offseason to become a great football player when the talented but lazy stud can walk out there and start over them, or they'll play anyway because they're all the team's got? Why believe that there will be rewards down the road if they sacrifice now when they don't actually have much reason to believe that's more than just another way of conning them to get in line? The life they want is a fantasy they're teased with in the media, but never actually taught, firsthand, how to achieve--or even if it really is achievable for them.

Politicians want the government to step up and fill those voids by providing welfare programs and turning the schools into a taxpayer funded babysitter service, but that's just exacerbating the problem. Schools are here to teach, but the focus on standardized testing just reinforces this idea that it's just another arbitrary hoop to jump through, so why really care? Churches try to do what they can, but what single mom wants to take her kids to a place where the whole family will be shamed, if she can even get Sundays off in the first place?

In a lot of ways, I think that the internet and iPads have actually helped in the fight against these things by at least giving kids the ability to learn about what they're interested in on their own time and figure some things out for themselves, but it's a whole society we're dealing with her. What can one teacher, or even one school, do when everyone else is undermining any attempt at instilling work ethic, real pride, or hope in these kids?

That's one of the reasons I love football. Our numbers are down just like most of the other programs, but it at least gives these kids a positive, genuine, supportive group to be a part of, free of a lot of the bureaucratic B.S. and empty promises that the schools are forcing upon them. It also shows them that nothing is guaranteed and teaches all those lessons that it always has. Now, more than ever, these kids NEED things like football in their lives.