So here's a little story from my past and my present. There's not much of a moral to it; it's mostly personal introspection. But if I had to find a take-home point, it would be this: physical impositions of any kind shouldn't be taken as cavalierly as some (many?) people do, for while most of them are truly benign, some may cause serious problems in some children and even pave the way to worse abuses.
Bad teachers and scary coaches
I was a perfect student and an all-around good, borderline boring little boy. Except for PE. The only pee-in-my-pants scary moments of my otherwise perfect childhood relate to experiences with my three PE teachers in grade school. To this day I still largely define bullying and abuse by comparison with how those teachers acted and talked. They didn't hit or "touched" me or others, that I know of, but they yelled a lot, they towered, and they enforced values that I despised and that conflicted with those of my parents: silence, subordination, and compliance.
There was a small incident when I was seven. The last day of school, after all was said and done, I found the second-grade PE teachers (Mauro and Josie) and I yelled a big fat "FUCK YOU" in their faces. One of the most satisfying moments of my whole childhood! My parents were less impressed: I was daring (or stupid?) enough to do it right in front of them! I suffered no major consequences, but some kind of conversation must have taken place between the school, my parents, and the teachers themselves. It became clear to my folks that my complaints about PE classes were a little more serious than those of a lazy chubby boy. I know there was talk of "problems with authority," which was odd, since teachers always praised me for my respect to elders! So I'm sure that was quite surprising for the adults in my life.
Perhaps after that, or in the neighborhood of that event, my parents decided that we needed to deal with the problem. I don't recall talking to counselors, though maybe I did and I just forgot. But for sure I know that my parents got me started on a lot of sports. In retrospect, that makes some sense. Your kid has a problem with physical authority figures, you may want to try and show him that those are isolated incidents and that physical activity is fun. This must have been an especially important battle for them to fight given that I was a chubby boy, by no means fat yet but definitely big-boned and prone to laziness. (As it turns out, they lost that one...)
So I took gymnastics and swimming starting that very summer, basketball the year after, and football (soccer) some time those years, though Italian kids are always playing football in the streets so that wasn't really a problem. That winter, I also took up skiing during a family trip.
All those basically turned into private PE sessions. I knew little or nothing about the sports, so I had to learn. Learning required teachers telling you what to do and directing your body to perform tasks that you might not otherwise want to do, so at first it was difficult. I don't remember the specifics, but I remember most of those lessons to be as grueling and anxiety-inducing as PE. Often I'd fake illnesses to get out of them; would not participate enthusiastically; gave teachers and coaches a hard time; the whole deal.
In gymnastics I got hurt quickly and often and it was by far the shortest-lived of them all: three, four weeks tops. In swimming I was always cold and very scared of the teacher, who apparently I thought of as "a dumb short-haired dyke with a raspy voice" (actual excerpt from my 8-year-old diary: yes, I was obviously very foul-mouthed!). Basketball was my favorite, but it was also the favorite of my third- and fourth-grade PE teacher, who while not nearly as abusive as Mauro and Josie was still a major asshole with a superiority complex, and thus pretty much ruined it.
My parents tried as much as possible to make me play sports instead of learning them, but apparently that was hard to achieve, as nearly all associations that organized children's leagues did so within the framework of "classes" or "lessons." So with the exception of football, which we played freely and often, I could never quite get rid of the instructional, authority-laden aspect of sports. So within 3-4 years it became apparent that it wasn't working well, and I remember that after I got to middle school my parents eased off a little.
Perhaps the only relevantly good sports experience of my childhood relates to tennis. At 13 I signed up for a small tennis school in my neighborhood that was led by a family friend. It was a small group, four kids in all, two guys and two girls. It was a lot of fun and we learned by playing. I stayed with it for almost two years and also pursued tennis independently, playing with friends and cousins. That didn't last because I got fat (lol), but it was good while it lasted and it did help ease my concerns for a while.
A mixed doubles tennis match at 16 was the last sporting event I ever played; to this day, almost 16 more years later, I have yet to play anything. Italian high schools don't have extra-curricular sports like American schools do, nor do they have serious PE programs: my high school PE consisted of two hours a week in the nearby public park, which were spent either playing football or (more likely) chatting girls up and listening to music. Thus ended my sportive woes, and, to a major extent, all my physical activity altogether.
Why such a big deal?
There are two separate problems here.
One is very general, and I am confident to make this an objective argument. Many sports coaches and PE teachers try to instill repugnant values into children. I mentioned some before: subordination and compliance. Only slightly less vile are the nearly fetishistic emphases on self-reliance, belief in oneself, and pushing one's limits. I have seldom met one who did not think that these were good things and who did not run his or her classes around them.
True, I can hardly think of ways to manage a group of little kids running around without some stricture. But many of them, especially in PE, really got off on it and made it the main take-home point of the class: that we had to do as we were told, period. Sometimes this was taken pretty far, at least by my standards. Second-grade PE teacher Mauro and middle school PE teacher Stefano both loved to make us stand perfectly still for 30 minutes, often for no reason other than "because I said so." Paola, in fifth grade, was fond of repeating that she "didn't need a reason" to tell us to do things, and when children cried she pointed at them and told the rest of us "this is not a good way to cope with problems." My opposition to these barbaric methods is of course connected to my broader attitudes about child-raising: that enforcing compliance is a poor way to shape respectful and successful adults and that obedience and respect are not very valuable virtues when displayed by children... but all of that lies beyond the scope of this essay.
The second problem is much more pressing to me, and it is more personal than anything, though there may be a hint of objective truth behind it that I'll get into later. I cannot stand to be told what to do with my body.
I see a huge difference between two kinds of authority: on the mind and on the body. I've no problem being told what to read, what to study, what to write. I submit easily to that kind of academic authority, and I always did as a child: doing my reading, doing my homework, doing extra homework as punishment, whatever. No problem. But when you tell me to go from here to there, or run faster, or jump higher, or even run and jump at all when I don't want to, I'll go into panic mode. Even as a child I had a clear feeling that "you're just not supposed to tell me that." It felt wrong under the skin, a violation of personal space, a stretching of limits. Some kids have a problem with being hugged or kissed; others panic when they read; me, it was physical activity.
While I would love to say that all I needed was a kick in the butt, I got plenty of those: that was the whole point of my parents' attempts to introduce me to positive kinds of physical activity, which again I can't really blame them for. The problem was simply that there was no physical activity that actually did ever feel positive to me. All invariably involved adult authority figures telling kids what to do, and that was a hurdle higher than mountains.
Let's be clear here: it isn't objectively wrong to force children to do what they don't want to do. Indeed, much good child-raising rests on imposition. It's clearly appropriate to force school attendance and personal hygiene, for example, for children will naturally resist them. But it's also crucial to assess what kind of resistance the child presents. Is it healthy? Does he just need a push or will a push make it worse? When you push him off the edge, will he grow wings on the way down or will he crash disastrously? How much is too much? That's always a vexing question for parents and I'm pretty sure there's no one answer. Thus, even though I am tempted to given my personal experience, I don't want to say that it's always wrong to force children to perform physical tasks that they don't want to do. Just like in school and personal hygiene, appropriate imposition in physical activity can go a long way and solve a lot of problems.
But again, you must be able to assess what kind of child you're working with. Some children will react very badly to it, and I know I have. I have belabored the point that my PE teachers were abusive assholes, but my basketball and tennis and skiing and football coaches were kind and supportive people. The problem, in those cases, was with me, not with them. It didn't matter how you sugarcoated it and how much of a nice guy you were: at the end of the day, you're still telling me how to move my body and I would just not have that. I couldn't have that. It was as offensive as if you had told me to eat crap or have sex with you, and at the end of each session I would be left feeling empty, isolated, and dirty.
Other children
Today, physical activity is at the center of one of my deepest disagreements with my best friend. I will use this as an example to lead to my next point. As a young girl she trained as a gymnast, a cheerleader, and a volleyball player. She grew up active and involved (sports, camp, etc) and is very fond of girls gymnastics. In this regard, our childhoods could not possibly be more different. Clearly, the thought of it all is quite abhorring to me. Immediately I imagine scores of little children locked in sweaty gyms being forced into physical labor by coaches as bad as mine, and maybe worse, given the popular image of psychologically and physically abusive gym coaches in the media. My friend insists that those are isolated incidents, if they are even true at all, and that most coaches are quite proper. Rationally I believe her, but I have a different conception of what's proper: as I have been explaining, even simply being told to move your body in a way that you don't want to is offensive and abusive in my mind. In a way, with some flair, I could put it this way: to me, "no means no" applies not just to sexual activity, but also to physical activity of any sort. Hence the disagreement and my difficulty coping with it.
There are, of course, other points of contention in this debate, most of all whether it is proper for preteen girls to undergo intensive training regimens that (IMO) unreasonably strain their bodies and force them to make commitments that (IMO) a child is insufficiently rational to make. I do firmly believe that when a child says "I like this and I want to do it," she should be listened to. But when the "this" involves intense physical activity, requires great physical sacrifice, and a much higher than normal potential for injury, then I am not so sure that I would want to yield to the child's desires.
The connection with physical authority should be evident. But what I'm really interested in, on a personal level, is this: I never know if my argument against the dangers of physical authority can withstand rational scrutiny or if it's mostly born of my own refusal of it. Am I just too biased because *I* have always seen physical impositions as abusive? Or is there also a rational, objective point to be made?
No doubt my own perception of abuse is the source of my rage about this issue. Of all the issues that I feel passionately about, this is one of those that gets me the most heated. (Not surprisingly, another is corporal punishment: striking children for any reason at all is one of the vilest things I can imagine, and that issue also involves the violation of personal physical space, so the connection is obvious). So, at most, I think that I can rationally say this: committing to professionalizing training regimens, in any sport, is a decision not to be taken lightly and that must be heavily scrutinized by the adults in the child's life. Children must be listened to, but their desire must not be final, nor must it be taken at face value, as in all other things that children say they want.
One key issue here is that children who are very resolute about taking up sports probably don't give a damn about adults having authority over their body. They probably see them as allies on the way to excellence, or complicit in their fun, and not as obstacles to overcome. No matter how I may feel, *they* probably don't feel that they are being violated when their muscles are painfully stretched, when they are made to run to exhaustion, when they are taken to the gym against their will. They probably see those impositions just as I have always seen the impositions on my mind: I don't want to do the extra homework, or read that boring book, but I do not resent those who make me do it, and I don't feel violated... just annoyed. Perhaps that's the answer.
The train doesn't stop there, of course. That you don't feel abused doesn't mean that you aren't in fact being abused, and I also firmly believe that people (especially children) are not always in the best position to know themselves better. Yet, the subjective feeling of older and sufficiently mature children really should be taken into account and properly weighed when making a decision.
Conclusion
As I said in the introduction, while most of these ruminations are but personal introspection, I do feel pretty confident in making two claims. (1) Refusals of physical authority must be taken seriously. Kids who display them may be just lazy or fussy, or a serious problem may be lying underneath instead, one intimately connected to their confidence and self-worth. (2) The very concept of physical authority is potentially dangerous. This is so for every human being, to whom we recognize bodily integrity, but especially so for children, who are weaker and mostly defenseless against encroachments.
Authority over the body needs to be assessed carefully and not as nonchalantly as many do. When employed thoughtfully, it can be healthy and productive. When abused, it is fertile ground for other problems unrelated to sports, including sexual and physical abuse, which are greatly facilitated by a cavalier attitude toward physical authority in general.
I'm not claiming that once children get into the habit of obeying their gym teachers they're suddenly vulnerable to being sexually abused; that would be most silly. What I do claim is that the mindset of some adults that "children who don't respond well to physical commands must be pushed and exhorted until they do" makes it a lot easier for abuse to take place, in both sports and life. It lowers the bar of scrutiny, as authority always does, replacing it with the trust in the source of a command, which is so easily misplaced. My point, then, is simply that physical authority is a much more grey area than is usually acknowledged, one where problems may lurk and go undetected. I suspect that may be because of a culture that sees physical aptitude as a sign of strength and its lack as an indicator of laziness and poor moral fiber, but that's a debate for another time.
Again, I have argued almost exclusively from personal experience, and then tentatively asserted that despite the bias there is still some rational and objective merit to my points. I hope that this will be as evident to the reader as it is to me. :)
