It's Tough Being 10

Joe's day started with me urging him to get ready for his early morning Karate lesson while his Mom was urging his sister to get ready to leave for her ballet class. We stopped at Starbucks for a coffee and a kid's drink and hit the dojo for 30 minutes of private instruction. Afterwards, we did breakfast at our favorite diner (that's the Landmark Diner in Buckhead), where we are loved and well cared for because we have breakfast there just about every Saturday morning. We then rushed to HairCutters and barely got back to the dojo in time for his 12:15 sparring class.....that's right, full contact and toe to toe. About 35 minutes into the class the instructor changes up the order and suddenly he is facing a purple belt (Joe is two belts behind) and she has hands like Ali! They're about 2 minutes into a 3 minute bout when she gets inside and unleashes a flurry of punches to his face, which clearly hurt and backs him off. She continues to exploit the advantage and the next 30 seconds are pretty hard on Joe. He sits down after the match and I can tell he is hurt and needs to get out of there, but I stay back and wait to see how he manages the situation. To his credit, he waits until he is ready to go again, but realizing that he still can't see for the tears, he excuses himself and retreats to the locker room where we start the ice compress. For the first time in two years he chose not to return to the class and we left to meet Mom and Ellie at Barnes & Noble. Another coffee, some books and then back to the house where we started working on his October book report, which has some elements due on Monday morning. Joe is nearly a straight A student, but it takes a lot of encouragement, direction and support. Anyway, I think about about being ten years old and I think about Joe's life at ten and because I think that I had more fun and less stress it makes me wonder if we are really giving our kids the opportunity to be kids? When I was ten we spent hours in the woods playing Army, Cowboys and Indians, etc. and our kids spend hours rushing to various outside programs, playing on their computers, the XBox, listening to music on their ipods and talking to their friends on their cell phones. Sometimes it is difficult to remember that at the end of the day, they are just kids. Have we reached the point where we want so much for our kids that we have forgotten how to let them be kids? Or am I just another parent watching his kids grow up in an era that he cannot truly recognize and wishing for something that doesn't make sense; i.e.: the simpler life that I enjoyed in 1960? I believe we all need to take a step back and pause......kids dying in Iraq and Afghanistan, nuclear tests in Korea, China building a huge equity in America by financing our debt......maybe it isn't so far from 1960 after all!