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Teaching kids the meaning of effort

Especially if no parent bothered to teach you


 

 

Effort wasn’t something my parents knew much about. Doesn’t matter why. They thought they did, but because they thought they did, they didn’t realize they never taught us what effort required, why it was important, and what would happen if you were incapable of maintaining any when it mattered most.

I kick soccer balls with the kids. We don’t play actual soccer, which is a sport I could care less about, we play soccer golf. You pick a target, that is the hole, and you score it just like regular golf. In regular golf they keep a statistic, Bounce Back, which measures how well you do on the hole after you don’t do very well, like triple bogey.

Even the best golfer can’t be a perfect golfer, but one thing he can control is how hard he tries on the next hole, and a high Bounce Back rating almost coincides with a winner. He won’t let a bad hole shut him down. Two years ago Justice Morrison of White River took seven shots on one hole at the start of the state Class B. He was out of it before he started, except he wasn’t. On the very next hole, he scored the only eagle of the tournament. He went on to place second at state.

Justice knows the meaning of Bounce Back. He knows the meaning of effort, and it shows in every little thing he does. All my life I have battled to apply effort the way Justice does as a high school golfer. Sometimes I succeed, but most times I put out an effort which only seems like a good effort relative to how I did competing against others.

I win writing awards for columns, but they are not evidence I work hard at it— I don’t. I am lazy, easily discouraged. Real success is measured by how much you got out of the gifts God gave you. Not by the quality of your competition. My parents never taught me effort, more than that, they were easily discouraged, and they taught me it was acceptable to be same.

When my boys kick a bad approach shot, they do not man up. They man down. They think, I did badly, why keep trying? And I intervene, I explain in painstaking detail why effort matters, I explain it because my parents never bothered, and I tell myself that was the critical difference in making me an underachiever who gives up. I hope I am right.

Because if I am right, then I can show my boys how to abandon their defeatist perception of effort, slowly help them build the focus and character and courage it takes to man up when things are at their worst, and screaming for you to man down.

(James Giago Davies is an enrolled member of the Oglala Lakota Tribe. He can be reached at skindiesel@msn.com)


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