Should I go to all my kid's sporting events?

I'm sorry to say it, but I do not believe it is necessary to attend every single one of your children's sporting events. I think it is a good idea to make it to as many as you can, but I do not think it is healthy for the child, nor the parent, to attend everything.

I think the most important part of being a parent is making sure kids are well taken care of.  So this means that work comes first.  If you do not work, your family will not eat. It is for this reason that you cannot keep skipping work in order to attend every sporting event.

If you sacrifice everything in order to attend every game, it makes children think the world revolves around them, and it doesn't. It makes them feel as though they are entitled to have their parents at every game cheering them on. It also limits the ability of parents to be adults.

Look! I remember my dad attending a majority of my baseball games as a kid.  I remember him coaching me.  But my dad was also not available at home most of the time due to his work.  He came home from the car lot at 6 p.m., ate dinner with us, maybe "wrassled" with us, and then had to go off to his second job.  He was a busy man.

As I look back on it, I'm not angry at my dad for working in lieu of spending more time with us.  In fact, just the opposite: I learned the importance of hard work and discipline. I learned that work is more important than play. On his off days, and on many evenings during the summer, he would spend time with us. But that didn't preclude his responsibility as the breadwinner in the family.

Things changed economically for my parents when my younger two siblings went to high school. By this time my dad was able to spend quality time at home.  So my dad did not feel so obligated to attend every sporting event.  I remember drinking beer with my dad at his cabin while my younger brother Tony was playing in a high school baseball games.

Dad was proud of Tony, even hung newspaper clippings on the wall of the cabin, but he didn't feel obligated to attend every game.  He did not have to. And I have never in my life, ever, heard my brother Tony complain about this. In fact, just the opposite.

So I do not believe it is essential for parents to be involved in every aspect of their children's lives. I think not doing so gives children a chance to be independent.  It shows kids that they are not the center of the universe.  It shows kids that work is more important than play. It shows them that taking care of other people, such as older relatives or younger siblings, takes priority over a simple sporting event.

Parents also need time to themselves too.  Parents need to have quality time together. Parents need to have quality time alone. Parents need to read and learn.  Parents need to have a social life. This is important for their own intellectual and personal development. Parents are adults who already have limited time to engage in adult pursuits. Stressing about every sporting event should not preclude your mental well-being.

Worded another way, life comes with priorities: God, wife, children, other people, and then other things. If you put your children's sporting events before your God, and before your spouse, problems are certain to ensue. It could mess up your marriage. It could mess up your psychological well being.

This means that there are other important aspects of life that are more important than children's sporting events that require time and effort. Attending every sporting event is an example of parents turning children into the center of their world, which has helped create a generation of children and young adults who feel self-entitled and expect everything to revolve around their wants and desires.

That said, if you can attend every sporting event, go for it! It's important to give your children attention, and to show them love, support and affection.  But there are also other important aspects of life that are more important than sports that require time and effort and take priority over sports.

Childhood depression on the rise, but are smartphones really the cause? Or is it schools teaching them to fear?

So reports of a rise in childhood depression have lead some of the world's leading child psychologists into blaming social media, such as Facebook, and material things such as smartphones.  The telegraph quotes a child psychologist with 25 years of experience named Julie Lynn Evans:

“In the 1990s, I would have had one or two attempted suicides a year – mainly teen aged girls taking overdoses, the things that don’t get reported. Now, I could have as many as four a month.... “f I try to refer people on, everyone else is choc-a-bloc too. We are all saying the same thing. There has been an explosion in numbers in mental health problems amongst youngsters. Something is clearly happening,” she says, “because I am seeing the evidence in the numbers of depressive, anorexic, cutting children who come to see me. And it always has something to do with the computer, the Internet and the smartphone.”

She's basically saying that kids are exposed to too much stuff, to too much information. They get too much access to wisdom too fast, and making more and more of them increasingly depressed.  I understand that kids today have fast access to knowledge we had to go out of our way to find at a library or bookstore when we were kids.

However, rather than jump to conclusions, lets consider some other things that are going on in the world today that might cause kids to become increasingly depressed.

1. Kids being taught that God, the harbinger of hope and faith, does not exist
2. Kids being taught that man made global warming is destroying the planet
3. Kids learning hearing doomsday predictions in schools
4. High rate of divorce that has kids separated from their families and friends
5. High rate of single parent households 
6. High rate of kids growing up in poverty
7. Kids being taught that they are bad if they respect traditional marriage
8. Kids being taught to be afraid of eating foods they love based on theories
9. Kids, many of whom are overweight, taught that being overweight is bad
10. Government programs taking away the incentive to work, thus leading to families trapped in poverty
11. Kids not being able to eat the feel good foods they want to eat while in school
12. Fear that Muslims will try to kill them
13. Not being able to speak the truth about Muslims
14. Christian children not being able to pray in school, or being ridiculed for talking about their beliefs
15. Conservative children being mocked and ridiculed for talking about their beliefs
16. Children hearing their parents called Nazis, homophobes, idiots, gramma haters, due to their beliefs
17. Christians being persecuted all over the world, and no one doing anything about it
18. The country being "fundamentally transformed" from capitalism to socialism. 
19. A rise in laws that tell people what they can and cannot do; laws that take away liberties
20. Kids not being told the truth about the founding of this country, and being ridiculed when they do
21. Kids being told they are idiots for believing in a "fictional, mythological Bible."
22. An endless parade of hate, fear, and vitriol being taught in schools.
23. Kids being told they cannot grow up to be better than their parents. 
24. Parents having to go bankrupt because of the poor economy
25. Parents losing their jobs because of the poor economy
26. Parents being forced to work two or three part time jobs because of Obamacare
27. Fear that they will have less freedom than their parents
28. Fear of terrorism
29. Fear that they will be forced to go to war
30. Fear of a Muslim Caliph
31. Fear of Russia taking over Europe
32. Fear of WWIII

I mean, I could go on.  What do you think.  Is too much access to wisdom making kids depressed? Or is it all the exposure to hate, fear and vitriol? 

It's good to talk politics with your kids

I remember debating with myself once what I should tell my children about the political world.  I actually decided once I shouldn't say anything, and let them figure it out for themselves.  The problem with this is: if I don't tell them the truth, where will they get it?

You see, that is the question that plagues all conservative parents:  If I don't teach my kids the truth, where will they get it?  If they get nothing but progressive or liberal propaganda, how would they be able to make an informed decision?

Take environmentalism as a good example.  The media/schools basically just go with the latest fad and go with it.  Back in the 1970s when liberals thought the planet was cooling, they wanted to melt the polar caps.  Yet then they were proven wrong and started calling it global warming.

During the 1990 and 2000s you had political leaders, such as Al Gore, telling people the world was going to burn up if we didn't act now. By acting, he wanted to create regulations to stop people from creating carbon dioxide (CO2).  But there has been no increase in global temperatures since 1996 or 1997, and so they changed the name to climate change.

Now all you hear about on TV, on the Disney channel, on CNN, on MSNBC, is how we are causing climate change.  So, if kids are so inundated with all this global cooling/global warming/ climate change stuff, how in the world are they ever going to make an informed decision.

They aren't.  There is not way a kid can make an informed decision when those who educate are telling them that a "theory" is a "fact."  Yes, indeed, a theory, be definition, is an educated guess.  It's what the scientific community goes with until they learn better.  It does in no way mean it is a fact.

My point is, kids ought to be taught both sides of the story, not just the global cooling/ global warming/ climate change side.  They ought to be taught the conservative argument that the earth's temperature increases and decreases in cycles.

Actually, the name "climate change" was stolen from conservatives just as liberal" was stolen from conservatives.  Did you know that the traditional definition of liberal was minimal government and a focus on personal liberties.  So, they basically forced classical liberals to change their name to conservative or libertarian.

Now they stole our idea; that the climate changes.  Only they twist the idea of "climate change" to make it appear as though it's caused by man.  The original idea is that the climate always changes, or goes through cycles no matter what man does.  

Look at it this way.  There were periods of global warming and cooling that altered the face of the planet many times over. In fact, there was a period of global change that occurred around 10,000 B.C. that forced humans to live around the three great rivers in that area: the Nile, Tigris, and Euphrates.  This migration resulted in the world's first civilizations in Mesopotamia and Egypt.

So, global change has always existed, and there is nothing that man can do to cause it, and nothing man can do to change it.  It just is.  It just does.  That is something, I bet, that few kids learn in school or from reading the news.

They are no longer shown both sides of an argument and allowed to decide for themselves.  They are no longer taught how to think for themselves.  They are now just shown propaganda in the hopes that they conform.

Surely I'd die happily knowing all my children agree with me politically. However, if they think otherwise, I'd still be happy knowing they made that decision with all the facts on the table.