Being tough has been banned!

Girls today are taught that they should be tough and stand up for themselves.  As the father of a daughter I think that this is great and want her to have the tools to be successful in life.  But as a father with a son it boggles my mind why the media and society in general have made it a horrible thing for boys to be tough.  In school you can get expelled or even arrested for fighting, but young boys fighting is exactly where the term boys will be boys came from.  So I see a generation of boys coming up that haven't been in a fight, have never came home with a black eye and had to explain what happened.  When I was a young boy fights were dealt with by adults, who apparently had a much better mastery and sense of responsibility than our leadership today.  They would make you shake hands with the boy you got in a fight with, you would get a note sent home and that was the end of it.  What this taught me was to accept responsibility for my actions, that there is a pecking order in life,  how to deal with adversity, how to respect an adversary and also how to forgive and move on.  None of these lessons are being taught today.  Administrators make fighting such a taboo thing and punish it so severely that parents are forced to either tell our boys to not fight, or deal with extreme consequences.  Consequently, instead of young boys fighting with each other and coming home with a shiner, they are bottling up the aggression, going to school and shooting their classmates.  Then the media glorifies these horrific crimes.   But if a boy punches another boy they are demonized on the news and by our society.  God gave boys testosterone so that they could be strong, tough, defend their families from insurgents, and provide shelter from the elements.  Now in the evolutionary chain we no longer have to defend our families from wild animals, invading hoards or build make shift shelters from trees.  But none the less we still have the same amount of testosterone and animalistic instinct to dominate our environment.  Conflict will arise in young boys lives and sometimes violence and being tough is the answer.  Anyone who says violence is never the answer needs to be reminded of two things:  World War I and II.  Tell me why "The Greatest Generation" was so named?  Was it for their toughness during the great depression and being able to win world wars with a tough, gritty attitude that even the Nazi power war machine could not overcome.  Or was it for their skinny jeans, unwillingness to fight, boy band pop music and gender blurring?  The answer is obvious, but for some reason our society has forgotten this.  Yet still, the heroes in our society are the tough ones, the ones that stand up for themselves, the ones that fight through the pain, the ones that keep going against all odds and this attitude is being stomped out by popular culture, the media, administrators, lawmakers and other leadership of the day.  I believe that hard weight training teaches a lot of these lessons that kids are not getting from society today.  They must learn to strain through a tough weight, push through conditioning and never give up.  They learn that sometimes other people are better than you and you can either complain about it or train harder and beat them.  The things I have learned in the gym have made me who I am today and I try to pass some of that on to the athletes that we train.  We hold them accountable, never let them quit and teach them how to push past what they ever thought was possible.  Now I know that society says we should coddle them, not let anyone feel like they aren't as good as someone else, and tell them it's okay to quit.  Well society may have banned being tough but at The Spot Athletics it is a mental state that we not only encourage but try to cultivate.  If you live long enough you learn that life isn't fair, you don't always win and if you aren't tough you'll never end up on top.  If you're not tough you will end up a victim, complaining about how life isn't fair instead of doing something about it.  For some reason our society is trying to create a generation of victims.  As a parent, I feel it's my job to stop this from happening so that my kids can be successful in life.  At The Spot Athletics we want all of our athletes to be successful in athletics as well as in life.  We try to accomplish this by making our young athletes into champions,  and you'll never meet a champion who claims to be a victim.  To become a champion you need a tough mindset.  One that makes you hold your ground, stand up for yourself, be confident in your abilities and fight for what you want.  These are qualities that we instill in both our boy and girl athletes. But I feel it is of utmost importance that our male athletes know that being tough is not just OK, it's what turns them from a boy into a man.  We obviously deal with a large number of young female athletes and the greatest pride I get from working with them is seeing the confidence that they build from training at our facility.  Most of our young female athletes that come in are tougher than the male athletes but they lack the confidence.  It's just the opposite with the young male athletes.   I see them come in with tons of confidence but none of the toughness that is needed to be a champion.  We instill that championship attitude and cultivate that tough mentality that is unfortunately being stomped out of the male youth of today.  So while society, and the media is stomping this attitude out, we will keep cranking out tough champions that will be successful in athletics and in life.