Team Players, Part 1: Forsythia and First Base

| By: Committee for Children

Summer is waning, school is on the near horizon, and my thoughts turn to my ten-year-old son’s very different but equally effective summertime coaches, Coach T (baseball) and Mr. Switzer (swimming). To illustrate their differences, here are excerpts from each of their pre-training mailings:

Coach T: “As gloriously golden as the forsythia growing along Little Pond Road has seemed over the past several budding-spring days, I can’t help but think of the delightful baseball green—might the Crayola company call it Quimby*?—of summer…. Baseball is first and foremost a kid’s game. As it should always be. And at the root of baseball is joy—the soundest, most constructive, most fructifying [look that one up] emotion I know.”

*Quimby is the name of our town’s playing field.

Mr. Switzer (all-caps his): “IN NO WAY ARE YOU TO INTERFERE OR COMMUNICATE WITH YOUR CHILD DURING CLASS. You cannot miss a class, and if your child is eight years old or older and won’t put his/her face in the water, you are out (and no refund).”

I’ve been working in the field of social-emotional learning (SEL) for more than 25 years. I am drenched in SEL. When my son Amos was born, I imagined that I would be at an advantage in guiding him to be a social-emotional genius. After all, I was socially and emotionally literate, wasn’t I? I was also, at that time, editor of a parenting books website, so had read countless volumes on the subject. I didn’t want to brag, but I did speak the language fairly fluently. Eh-hem.

The fridge magnet doesn’t make the man

Alas, as parents and educators know, the path from adult brain to child brain is indirect at best. Problem solving, emotion management, empathy …none of those skills moved smoothly from me to Amos. I modeled. I articulated. I shared. I lectured. I even had Second Step skill magnets on the fridge. But Amos was determined to learn in his own way on his own timeline. Go figure. So, how to clear the path for SEL in Amos? Ultimately, my husband and I made three useful discoveries:

1. Trusting time.If we stayed calm and kept putting our message across (for example—hypothetically speaking, of course—“we don’t hit in this family”), time eventually would do its thing.
2. Peers have power. The minute he entered kindergarten, our boy started getting “schooled” by his friends, especially the older ones. Rules are rules in playground kickball, and woe betide the six-year-old who tries to get around them. Amos began to differentiate between right and wrong, at least on the playing field.
3. Kismet. In our very own town we found adults with magical powers. That is, coaches with unwavering confidence in themselves as educators and in their pupils as learners. Coach T and Mr. Switzer know exactly what “their” children can do, and they won’t let them get away with anything less. They just do it with very different methods.

Baseball for life

Coach T regularly quotes Leonardo Da Vinci, Plato, and Yogi Berra. Geometry and chess are as natural a part of his coaching method as hitting and throwing. He will often spend a full hour talking, and not one child will squirm or take his eyes off him. We’re talking “R-E-S-P-E-C-T.” Coach T liberally sprinkles rewards and praise over the kids, sometimes stopping the action on the field to stride over to a player and wordlessly fist-bump her. He never, ever yells.

Amos simply can’t get enough of baseball with Coach T. He and all his teammates are genuinely kind and respectful on the field, and it’s clear the lessons spill over beyond baseball, though perhaps not as consistently off the field—they are only 10 and 11, after all. But we now know that Amos is more than capable of listening, synthesizing information, and working through disappointment, even if he can’t always apply it at 7:45 p.m. when his mean parents won’t let him have a second dish of ice cream.

“Is this my son?”

More than once I’ve watched Amos step up to the plate with laser concentration , swing, miss, and step back off the plate. He takes several deep breaths, as if he has all the time in the world.

Is this my son? The kid who ordinarily can’t stand to wait the half second between calling “Mom,” and hearing my “Yes?”?

Everyone else on the field calmly waits, too. There’s a steady patter from the dugout and the field: “You can do it, Amos!” And he does. Or he doesn’t. But it’s okay, either way.

Last year he had a hitting slump that lasted weeks. He simply could not make contact with the ball. Keep in mind that Amos has never handled failure well. If he’s not the best at whatever he’s doing, forget about it. But he stuck this slump out, trying different positions, using his secret calming technique (he still won’t tell us what it is, but it happens when he’s taking those deep breaths off the plate), listening to Coach T’s even voice. Eventually, as in all good baseball movies, he cracked a beautiful line drive past second base and the slump was over. The point, though, was that he never faltered in his determination and willingness to keep trying. He was deeply pensive during those weeks. He spent time at home thinking and practicing. But he stayed on top of his frustration, which, for us, his parents, was like watching him take his first step or read his first chapter book: unbelievably gratifying.

Read part 2