«Enough is enough!» This is the cry that many children and young Spanish athletes are sending to their parents and supporters. Enough of the insults, enough of a lack of respect, enough of berating coaches, colleagues and opponents, enough of turning sport into a battlefield, where fans destroy the work of sportsmen with impunity. The deplorable use of verbal and even physical violence by some parents and fans can be seen in the Spanish junior football leagues practically every weekend.
This message, “Enough is enough” has been echoed by various football clubs in Spain, the latest being Doctor Fleming CD of Seville. Society must pay heed to this immediately. We are becoming less and less empathetic, respectful and more and more ignorant, starting from the very early years at school. We look for talented children who, will become great professionals in the future, but we forget about making them well-rounded people. We live in the «now or never» society, where we teach our children to be competitive from a very young age. From childhood we try to instil in our children that they have to be the best. We tell them, «You have to study hard to get the best marks in your class so that you can to be what you want in the future and be the best at it. And you have to do it now, otherwise it will be too late.”
And my question is this- Why will it be too late? Indeed, even gaining a university degree cannot guarantee you a job nowadays…
Deliberately or unwittingly we are injecting our children with extreme doses of competitiveness. We are turning them into people who only value the results (winning in sports, getting top marks in their studies..) more than the process. We have forgotten to work on our children´s emotional development, something which is extremely important. Recognising and mastering your emotions is essential to give the best of yourself and, above all, to pull yourself up and stand on your own two feet whenever a situation in life gets you down.
In addition to forgetting emotional intelligence, we are also forgetting to mention values. Children no longer receive them in their classrooms, in their spare time or even at home. On the contrary, parents and those close to them, in many cases, encourage their children to behave with a set of “counter values”. We have replaced empathy for selfishness and egocentrism, respect for violence. Instead of a set of logical and necessary values needed to properly bring up a child we have replaced them with the very opposite.
This excessive competitiveness and this education with ”counter values” is causing what we are increasingly seeing and hearing in the media. In sports it leads to violence, in education it leads to bullying, at home it leads to domestic violence, and so on and so forth.
And why? Because in this society of «now or never» we are only judged on the results we achieve. And when something goes wrong, someone pays.