I spend a lot of time looking at young people and sizing them up. My children and their friends, my students former and current – I get a good look at so many.
And some of them struggle. Well, many of them struggle. Hell, all of them – all of us, young or not – struggle. To be human is to struggle.
But some people sure struggle more than others.
I will tell you one thing which almost always gives me encouragement when I regard a person. If they participate regularly in exercise, if they self-identify strongly with a sport, if they belong to an athletic team or exercise community, it is a strong stroke in their favor.
“Why?” You may ask me. “What are your reasons?”
There are the following:
Firstly, no matter what might be the stresses and struggles an individual encounters, if they have a way of gaining physical release through sweat and exertion it helps to ground and center a person. If a person experiences unusually high levels of anxiety, exercise helps to find catharsis for it. You gain the appetite for your next meal, and you earn your good night’s sleep (in part), by allowing your body to engage in physical exertion. On a daily basis, a person needs to stay active. Your endocrine system needs to work itself up, and your heart and lungs will want to move beyond just breathing and beating. “Use it or lose it.” Build muscle, build resilience, build competence, and so build health – emotional and physical health.
Secondly, if you join a community through some athletic endeavor, it is an excellent opportunity to make friends and join a community. Especially for me, the possibilities to build a social network and gain social support are huge. Women might make friends face-to-face relatively well just talking, but men make friends usually shoulder-to-shoulder via an activity. Put yourself out there. Whether it is a running club, a yoga studio, a SCUBA class, a USTA tennis league, a pottery class – or whatever – you can get out of your house and enjoy human contact via a shared activity. Anything is better – especially for young people – than laying in bed bored and lonely while looking at their iPhone and searching for something which will make them feel less bored and lonely. For too many, this is the default pose. That is highly unfortunate.
A physical outlet, and an opportunity to find a place among your peers. What is there not to like? (I know, I know… some people are just allergic to sweat.)
Let me show you an example. Many years ago I came to know a talented but troubled young lady. She was incredibly brilliant and driven, but she was also tightly wound and neurotic. When she was in high school, she was an award-winning figure skater. This activity, in addition to academics, took all her best hours and energies. But the competitive skating went away as she went off to college. Losing this protective layer of exercise and support put her at risk: I could see this clearly. I was worried that her unquiet mind and difficulty in being comfortable in her own skin would put her in jeopardy. So many young adults are their own worst enemies – they get in their own way – their brains are “problematic,” and so are as much a hindrance as a help. They struggle with their mental health.
After college I saw this young lady had entered into the competitive road bike circuit. In essence, she had replaced ice skating with road biking. That gave her a community. It gave her a way to stay in shape. She could get out of her head and get a great workout. She gained friends, acquaintances, gossip, community, events, and something to look forward to next month and next year. I did not think she would ever be terribly comfortable in her skin, or get married, or be “happy.” She just was not born that way. But when I saw she was all-in with the biking community where she lived I was pretty sure she would be ok in adult life, her incredibly tight-wound nature notwithstanding. I knew she would thrive in school and at work: that was never in doubt, that was where she excelled. It was her interior emotional life and mental health that was the problem. She struggled to like what she saw when she looked in the mirror. But the road biking passion project would go a long way towards balancing that out, I strongly suspected.
I have always thought in most cases physical exercise was more effective in combatting depression and anxiety than is talk therapy or SSRI medication. Exercise just takes more effort than therapy or drugs – or more sweat, to be more specific. Talk therapy can almost always be helpful. But it can also be expensive and difficult to find and schedule a therapist. Exercise is simple. You just do it.
This has influenced my own parenting. My kids were going to participate in a sport – or some extracurricular – in addition to school. That would be important. They were not going to lay around the house after school and on weekends. My daughters would have a fair amount of authority to choose the directions they wanted to take their lives, but their lives would have direction, believe you me, my esteemed reader. My daughters would not stagnating, lonely, spinning their wheels, crawling the walls, arguing with their siblings and/or parents. During the COVID-19 pandemic much of this could not be avoided, as the local governments canceled so much of what the outside world had to offer my daughters. But pandemic lockdowns are firmly in the past now.
I remember reading the powerful article “Two Classes, Divided by ‘I Do’” (ie. “assortative mating”) way back in 2012. I was new to parenting at that time and receptive to parenting guideposts. I will never forget the example of Jessica Schairer in Ann Arbor, Michigan: a single mother raising three children with a deadbeat dad who contributed nothing and lived several states away, working in low wage daycare to pay the bills, sharing a small apartment with her kids, with almost no activities scheduled on weekends because they were too expensive. The kids would drive each other and their mom crazy in their crowded apartment. Screams and complaints: bored kids. Too little to do, not many friends, and no activities on the calendar. Contrast that to her married boss Chris Faulkner whose kids had two parents at home, plenty of extracurricular activities, and teammates and friends in them. With two parents and two paychecks instead of one, their household benefitted in so many ways. Single parenthood, for so many reasons, sucks so bad.
I totally wanted my family to be like the Faulkner family, not the Schairer family. I am still traumatized by watching a video of Jessica Schairer’s family: the kids yelling at each other in their crowded apartment, all weekend with nothing else to do, few reasons to go outside – unable to afford much, with few connections with the community. Isolated, poor, lonely, and struggling. I would pay whatever it cost to get my daughters opportunities to build their people skills and keep their bodies strong in team sports and group activities – to learn how to win with grace and lose with dignity. I want them around other kids. I want my daughters to learn to work with others and how to take instruction, and to seek to maximize their potential, whether individually or in a group. We would try not to lay around the house lazy and bored. I would try to find that elusive sweet spot for parents: with offspring neither overscheduled nor under-scheduled. It is a delicate balance. Like the unicorn, the perfect life-work balance is never actually encountered in real life. But one can come close to a good balance. It is hard to underestimate how important this is for parents. You can avoid the Scylla of your children being too busy and overtired and the Charybdis of being not busy enough and bored. Hopefully, that is.
It is not easy.
One has to pay constant attention. You have to schedule all the activities, with your child’s help.
And you have to drive your child all over God’s green earth and pay for it all: it is exhausting. Time, money, effort: you have to be willing and able to pay.
But it is still way better than laying around the house all day long, with little to do. Bored. Querulous. “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.” So true.
It is just like in Annette Lareau’s concepts of “concerted cultivation” and “benign neglect.” I read Lareau’s book back in 2011, a year before I read about Jessica Schairer, and I did not forget any of that either.
Only a fool learns from their own mistakes. Learn from the mistakes of other people.
And so in a country with high depression rates, a loneliness epidemic, and rising levels of suicide, it would be wise to parent intentionally and wisely. So I have tried intensely, as much as I could, to raise happy and well-adjusted kids in my household: seeking to find the sweet-spot between “too much” and “too little.”
Other parents might make different choices. YMMV.
Otto von Bismark
