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Originally Posted by abc_123
Of course, your're right. Generalization on my part that won't hold up when taken down to the granular level. Also a spurrious correlation, like saying eating Tomatoes causes death (everybody who eats tomatoes dies at some point, right?) Achieving excellence in whatever you do be it sports, music, academics, take dedication, hard work and sacrifice. Things that are uncommon.
I guess where I was going is the coincidental explosion of youth soccer and the whole entire "soccer mom" thing with our society's seeming increasing unwillingness to let kids have unstructured play and roughhousing...where arguments happen and are settled where kids experience conflict and are forced to resolve it through all the various means. Where they first learn (usually after coming home and getting advice both wanted and unwanted from parents) about the role of aggression and violence in the problem solving process....and that it's OK to be physical.
I just don't remember the "be nice and not play rough" concepts when I was growing up not too very long ago and participating in more "traditional" American youth sports like I saw during my boys brief experience with youth soccer.
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I have played and coached soccer for the past 25 years and I can tell you there is every bit as much conflict and aggression in soccer as there is in football, the competition is fierce and physical aggression is every bit as real as in football, the ways of taking it out are simply different.
I think what you're describing has more to do with the everyone gets a trophy style of thinking that has become so pervasive in nearly all sports and in our society today rather than the aspects of the individual sports children are playing today.
The problem as I see it is as others have stated, we are simply raising fewer and fewer sheepdogs and more and more sheep.
I can vividly remember my father teaching me to never start a fight, but to always defend myself, consequently I learned that if the fight came to me, I should seek to finish it quickly to protect myself and others. From what I've seen today most parents teach their children not to fight for any reason, they teach their children to simply walk away. Which I have to say I can understand in some ways when you consider what would have been a simple fist fight in my youth may end up with a shooting or stabbing today.