What Kids Need to Succeed

Hockey Cat (Photo credit: foodiesathome.com)

“How would you like to be followed by a video camera, with vivid color and complete sound recording capability, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, every day for eighteen years?”

That question came from a desire for a strong metaphor to help parents appreciate the power of their own example.  And now there’s YouTube.  Frankly, it is not what I had in mind.

I just spent over an hour googling AHL hockey coach Jim Playfair – mostly because I was curious to know who he was before his now-famous stick-breaking, mad dog crazy, foaming at the mouth tantrum on the job.  Televised.  And by now re-played more than a million times.  (OK, go ahead.)

Why did I spend an hour?  Mostly because I was sure that, with more than forty pages of results containing almost one million mentions, I would find something other than a link to that YouTube video.

I found a single page with his stats, and another two or three mentions of the fact that he was an Olympic torchbearer.  And it took the better part of an hour.

On the other hand, my search for Patrice Bergeron yielded one page linking to articles about his visits to injured high school hockey player Matt Brown… followed by several pages of other types of information.

Role models are important and everyone makes mistakes.  Do ‘bad acts’ render us one-dimensional?  Do they ‘weigh’ more than kindness and good grace?  Or, are we so addicted to the extreme, bizarre behavior that dominates the media that we have we started to think that this type of behavior ‘normal’?

Maybe some of you will take this opportunity to have family discussions about privacy and internet safety and reputation and doing the right thing, even when nobody’s watching. Others might talk about leadership and role modeling and sportsmanship, while others may talk about media biases.  There’s a lot to learn here!

By the way, for those of you keeping score at home, buried fairly far down in most of those articles, was an apology from Playfair to parents involved in youth sports — especially youth hockey.

But you’d have to get past the video to see it.