By Melissa Hart

A friend and I were talking on the phone while he was loading his two elementary age boys in the truck from their Saturday morning Junior Pro basketball game. They were going home to feed his flock of ewes and check for more lambs. I chuckled as he described his frustrated experience of watching 9-year-old boys attempt to play full court basketball.

I properly commiserated with watching 10 little boys run around like a swarm of bees after a big orange ball. Very few of them knew how to dribble, which was of little concern when they could just pick up the ball and run with it and get halfway down the court before a whistle was blown.

Those 9-year-old boys just needed a pat on the back and a word of encouragement to keep dreaming their NBA all-star dreams. Any poor shots or lost games were water under the Gatorade bridge once they saw a bottle of their favorite color ready for them after the big game.

As they got older, competition was better, the games were tighter and winning was the goal. Their brains were more engaged with the plays than with the snacks after the game. Warm-ups meant counting shots and executing from the three-point line instead of being first in line to shoot the ball and comparing the colors of their basketball shoes. Losing spurred them onto be better for the next game. A word of encouragement needed to be more specific and tempered with a realistic evaluation of what went wrong and genuine concern.

As they got older and the basketball court in the barn turned into the center court of pick-up games between siblings and friends, they needed less game encouragement and more life coaching.

Each stage of development may have been different but all of them needed the unconditional love of a mom and the approval of a dad. And in today’s upside-down world where the attention span of a teenager is less than a goldfish, love and approval are needed even more. Kids are resilient and have proven that repeatedly, but that doesn’t give us permission to just toss them into the deep water and expect them to clock an Olympic world record.

In an attempt to navigate a pandemic, we have chosen protocols that have left our young children breathless and our teenagers floating in an abyss of selfish adult choices without regard to an honest education and Truth-centered morality.

Now is the time for parents to keep playing with your toddlers, keep hugging your adolescents, keep leading your teenagers and keep affirming your adult children. Then turn to one another and love each other like there is no tomorrow, because your children’s stability and future depends on it.