Raising the future

From the moment you are a child, life tries to pre determine what you will do when you grow up.  As boys we are given Basketballs, Footballs, and Baseballs to learn to play.  Naturally by the time we get to understand what that ball is we learn to love it.  It's hard for our young men not to want to grow up to be Professional Athletes since they have learned to love throwing a football, shooting a basketball, or catching a baseball.  We can make excuses for the reasons why our kids don't grow up to want to be Doctors and Lawyers, but we should know why.  Its imperative to give our children other outlets to express themselves. When our kids are only being exposed to sports all their lives they can begin to allow sports to define them, not allowing for development of other important social skills.  Most of us fathers push sports onto our kids because we want our kids to succeed where we didn't.  A lot of parents push their kids to sports because the money is great.  At what point does what our kids do in their futures reflect back on us?  Shouldn't we push our kids to do more things that holds a career longer than 10-15 years with more of a positive influence.  If we decide to allow our kids to be Pro Athletes it's important that we help them understand everything that comes with that job, and their responsibilities as a role model.  We spoke about how the media and movies paint pictures of minorities, and I believe that's due to lack of minorities writing these scripts and news headlines.  Let's promote the youth to do a little more with their lives other than play sports, which is easier said than done granted on how much it costs to get a College education in this country. I say we make sure that the youth understands playing sports is to pay for your college education and while your in college take advantage of what they are learning.  So the question is do we prevent our kids from playing sports to break a stigma or do we allow them to do what they love the most?