What not to say to your kid at the end of a game....

Keeping your emotions in control is hard to do.  Keeping my mind ahead of my mouth is an even harder proposition for me sometimes.  While, I find it easy to encourage each kid on my team and even on the other team, my frustrations with my own kid make me a dick sometimes. 

If you are looking for themes in the past few posts, me being too hard on my kid is one of them. We all want our kids to have fun and get along, and not everybody wants their kid to be the best, but it's pretty hard for me to not expect more out of my daughters than what is fair to ask.  We played another team last week that primarily consisted of boys, and by primarily I mean they had one girl and she was looking at the clouds the entire time.  This team had by far the two best players we have been up against.  I think combined they scored like six goals.  Hell, they even both even new how to do a step-over.  Now, while they may sound impressive, under the context, they were in the corner by themselves doing a step-over to fake out no one, but still a four year old with moves is a sight to see. 

What else was exciting to see was the initiative taken by one of my girls.  After taking about three goals in five minutes, one of my players went to the back and stood in front of the goal and said, "I'm going to get the ball."  She practically yelled it.  I was impressed.  We were not as fast, or as skilled but she understood that standing in front of the goal (even though technically goalies aren't allowed) prohibits most goal scoring in an under four league and she was right.  We gave up maybe one more goal total for the rest of the game and I had girls rotating to play "defense".  Hell, I'm happy if they don't use their hands, don't kick with their toe, and don't cry but figuring out how to play defense and patrol a part of the field was cool.  I have the makings of a center back on my hands. 

Back to me being a dick.  By the end of the game, Ruby was tired, she wasn't running hard and was consistently wanting to sit on the sidelines.  She is a social butterfly and likes to chat it up with her teammates and I love her for that, but we are there to play soccer and she is one of the better, more physical players, and I need her to shine when we play boys teams.  The convergence of her attitude, us getting our asses handed to us, and my stupid mouth, led me to this comment after we slapped hands coming off the field.

"Ruby, you are played terrible today."

She proceeded to walk off the field and cry to mom.  Well, Emily came up to me and says, "did you tell Ruby she played terrible today?"

"Yep."  She gave me one of those looks like, you have to be a complete dumbass.  I didn't even try to plead my case, there was none.  I walked off the field, went up to Ruby and apologized.  I tried to justify my actions to her with a rational explanation and I could tell she new I wasn't trying to hurt her, I was just frustrated.  Things blew over pretty quick based on the fact that 30 seconds later both Ruby and Alice voted to ride home with me. Possibly because they knew we were going to rock out and with Dad, there is always the potential for candy.

I will leave you with this, when your frustration with your kids gets to the point you want to tell them how disappointed you are with them, tell them you are disappointed, don't tell them they are terrible.  One word can make a big difference.