The Great American Dream...How's It Going?

I heard a mother the other day say that she didn't really like her kid to play soccer because she had to experience losing sometimes. This was a middle class mother who's child has it all. She is smart, attractive, has a full belly of healthy foods every day, goes to a good school, and has two loving parents. The child is 10. Her parents are trying to protect her from the devastation of her soccer team losing a game. This brings up a lot of issues for me. The point of the game, aside from exercise and working together is to win. It seems to me that most kids I see like to strive for something. If a child doesn't experience failure, will they end up being afraid to take chances, go out of the box? Since when does not winning a game count as losing? "It doesn't matter whether you win or lose, it is how you play the game?"

I think the bigger problem is how to level the playing field. Except for the most rare instances, kids who come from across the tracks are lucky if they can get a shot at anything these days. Consider the 21,000,000 kids in our country who don't have enough food each day. Consider the number of kids who have a parent in jail. Think about schools where kids have to go through metal detectors looking for guns and knives just to walk into an overcrowded classroom with overworked and underpaid teachers.

Many of these kids would outshine and out play the middle class kids if they had a level playing field. In Cuba, after the Revolution, children who's life trajectory had been semi-slave labor in the Barcardi sugar fields, chained to their beds at night, underfed and illiterate, suddenly, with a fair shot, a level playing field, became doctors, inventors, ballet dancers.

I am not a socialist or a communist or a libertarian or any of those labels. I have watched the failures and misuse of these 'isms' in my lifetime. But I do believe that we have rights and responsibilities as human beings, as brothers and sisters, as spiritual beings inhabiting bodies. So, I get confused when I see parents keeping their kids from the ordinary challenges of life. I understand protecting children from the horrors of life before they are developmentally prepared to face them. I really understand the need to offer physical safety to our kids, but I don't get the idea of doing homework for kids and feeding their dog, and picking up the room of a teenager and telling them what courses to take in college or letting them think that everybody should get a medal for everything.

So, I guess one question that comes from this line of thinking is how can we prepare the kids and protect them at the same time? And how can we work towards leveling the playing field so that the majority of our kids have a shot at a good life?  I think we really need to address these questions if we want a future for our country.