In seems like a very big deal in America that your dad comes to watch your sports game when you're young…
On the one hand I get it, it's about parental attention….but thinking back to when I was a young kid in rural Australia playing sport my dad would come to some games but I really didn't care either way if he came or not…we have a good relationship so it's not a comment on that, but I was with my mates and stuff so I didn't mind if he wasn't up for being bored in the stands watching a bunch of kids play bad soccer.
But in American TV and stuff it seems like the greatest crime a dad can do is miss the game. Is it just a dramatic shorthand for parental inattention or is it actually a big deal?
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>dramatic shorthand for parental inattention.
Yes
It’s a straightforward “yes-or-no” way to show parental attention, as you said.
Historically, traditionally, men worked outside the home and women either stayed home (*ETA- “worked inside the home” – I thought this was implied but clearly some people think I’m implying women don’t work if they’re taking care of the home.*) or worked outside the home but still did the majority of child care.
This is changing of course and has been for decades, but TV tropes last longer than the culture they reference.
It’s a “dad’s taking time off work to do something for the kids, see how much he cares” thing. And yes it is outdated.
It’s a movie/TV trope where the dad is usually too busy with work or they’re divorced parents and the kid is seeking attention. The context of the material should be a clear indication as to why.
Because that means they care, not having a parent at a game doesn’t look great unless they’re busy.
Well tv has limited ways to show active parenting
>Is it just a dramatic shorthand for parental inattention or is it actually a big deal?
Specifically dramatic shorthand for the career focus ultra capitalist system. I think it is more of a 90s phenomenon from boomer generation producers who struggled with “selling out” I think millennials internalized this as “if I can’t be there for my kids, I shouldn’t have kids”
they go hand in hand. Im not sure if its as prevalent in other countries, but the US has a serious problem with absentee fathers. A large number of us either grew up with a dad who either wasn’t there at all, or was completely emotionally unavailable. When my dad stopped coming to my games it was indicative of many things going terribly in my life at the same time, but being a 10 year old the only one I had the emotional capacity to begin to understand was the fact that my dad didn’t want to come to my games
Is it a trope? I can’t recall seeing it ever. Much less so repetitively that it has become a trope.
Sports are one of the most important things in American culture, so having your dad come to your games is important
My dad came to nearly all of mine, and I go to nearly every one of my son’s games, especially school sports. I will admit I miss many more of my daughter’s cheer competitions, but this is really a factor of double booking with my son’s games, so my wife and I have to divide and conquer
Well unfortunately in the US it was for quite some time common for parents in general and fathers in particular to kind of emotionally neglect their children, and not give them the attention they really need, so “Dad coming to the game” might depending on the person and time period actually be quite a big deal, because it almost never happens.
It’s not just sports either, it can also be a recital or play.
It’s shorthand for parents being absent and the effect that has on a kid’s self-esteem
It CAN be a big deal if you can tell it’s because your dad doesn’t really care about you, and it’s even worse if he goes to one kid’s game but not the other’s. My friend’s dad quit going to her sports meets so he could go to his stepson’s, and it’s still a painful memory for her.
A parent attended less than 5% of my sports games.
Granted I played a lot of sports, and games were often scheduled on weekdays before my dad would even be home from work (since the school you were competing against would take a bus to you or you would take a bus to them, and the school bus needed to be back at your “home” school by a certain time).
As a kid, I didn’t care/notice.
As a teenager, it was ideal that they weren’t there because it would have gotten in my head and made me play worse, as I’d be dreading the lecture for every little thing I did wrong.
My parents would go on parents night.
My brothers played football.
They didn’t want to go because they were afraid they might get hurt playing.
You nailed it. Dramatic shorthand. IRL, My dad was at every game I ever played in. Some years/sports, he was my coach.
When my children were born, I swore I’d never miss a game, and so far I haven’t. I think it’s important for my kids to know I’m there for them, win or lose. I don’t give a damn if someone else thinks it’s outdated. My kids will never look to the sideline and not see me there.
I think part of it isn’t American culture but writers’ culture. Writers often feel inspired to write about missed connection, especially between parent and child so the concept of stoic dad not connecting with children gets hyperbolized.
And then given the proliferation of American movies, it’s perceived as an American thing, when it is really a wider writer’s thing.
My son’s stepdad loved wrestling and went to all of his matches and would criticize horribly afterwards. Needless to say it made him hate it even more. The following year he did track and was very good at it but his stepdad never went. I know it hurt my son as I would see him scanning the bleachers for him. It broke my heart. We split up and it took years for my son to get over it.
It’s just an easy, concrete way to establish dramatic tension over whether or not a parent is meeting their kid’s emotional needs. There are plenty of parents in real life who can’t make all their kids’ events in real life and when it’s a healthy parent/child relationship, “Dad had to work and couldn’t make the big game/recital” is not earth-shatteringly important. But if a parent is emotionally or physically unavailable the rest of the time, them failing to arrive to a big event is a good way to demonstrate in the context of a story that they are fucking up as a parent.
Haha! My dad was like this! I had little league games where sometimes he was there.
We lived in the suburbs of a large city. He was a salesman, busy busy! All the time! Busy doing sales! And making sales calls on his car phone which was a big deal in the early 90s! Also an alcoholic.
My parents finally got divorced when I was in Jr. High and he was at none of my HS games and we’ve been estranged since.
When you’re an adult and working, you’ll realize that sometimes the people who get to the office early and work late aren’t busy, they’re just avoiding things, like ‘home’ or ‘wife’ or ‘kids’. You’ll also realize that people have kids for all sorts of bad reasons, like thinking that having a kid will make their partner become mature or shape up or fix the relationship. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t, people don’t change.
No one is answering this exactly properly and I know the answer because I was totally that kid whose parents rarely came to games.
Folks, and you, are right it is in an indicator of inattention but you must understand that as a kid it is the COMPARISON and PUBLIC DISPLAY that is devastating.
You see all the other parents there almost every game. So you can’t help but compare yourself to other kids and you see plain as day that their parents have them as a top priority, and that your parents to not have you as a top priority. The contrast is stark.
And it is embarrassing. Everyone on the team can see that your parents aren’t there.
These small, mostly unnoticeable, things are enormous through the eyes of a 9 year old.
Many entertainers are fundamentally unhappy people. That’s why they do what they do. They need affection and approval of others. Being in the entertainment business is actually quite shitty and you have to really love it to do it for a long time. Long hours, feast or famine work schedule, etc. I worked in theater early in life and our rule was always “don’t date an actress” because they were so fucked up. Yes, there also lovely people out there, but the average is skewed towards damaged people.
Thus, are tons of mommy and daddy issues out there in the entertainment business. This shows up in stories. “I begged my dad to come see the championship game but work was more important” is a common theme.
I do know average people for whom this was a thing, but for most of us, there were way too many games to attend. I was on a sailing team in high school and I’m pretty sure my mom didn’t come to ANY of the races. Not a huge deal, it’s hard to watch them from shore.
I mean, I specifically didn’t want my dad to come to my sports stuff but he did anyway.
So I don’t really get the whole thing.
See the song “Cat’s In The Cradle” by Harry Chapin
It is dramatic short hand but also it’s indicative of American work culture and fatherhood culture.
Lots of American boys in the past and still to this day don’t really get to see or hang out with their dad much during the week because he’s always working or busy. That means weekend sporting events are one of the only times the parent isn’t busy and can both give attention and praise to their kid.
If the dad isn’t busy and misses the event it shows to the kid that the reason he doesn’t see or hear any positivity is their fault rather than showing the kid that dad is busy but still cares.
I’m 42 now, I played T-ball, then coach pitch for 4 total years.
I played basketball for 3 years in elementary school.
I played ice hockey in 5th grade – our whole family got the flu and were all sick for a week. They thought I quit so kicked me off the team for missing 1 practice.
I played flag football from 6th grade to 8th, and then full contact freshman and sophomore year of high school.
I wrestled from sophomore year to senior year.
As an adult I’ve been in 4 bands, one of which wrote an EP and had a pretty large catalog of originals we played live. The other 3 bands were cover bands.
I’ve done solo acoustic shows at the local bars on the patio on sunny summer weekends.
My Dad went to one football game, and one wrestling match. He thinks I’m just a basement musician living off the system. I have a full time job and I make a damned good living outside of my weekend warrior music stuff, these days I mostly just fill in here and there. My last show was about a half mile from his house. He’s never seen me play.
Mom passed away in 2017, they divorced in 01. She never missed a game, not even the away games, and she went to every show she could. I miss seeing her in the front row and bleachers. I got sober in 2019 and my Dad is the last living immediate family member I have left and he is seeing me at my absolute best, and doesn’t think I’m enough. It fucking sucks. It destroys me.
As an adult I’ve played in local softball leagues for 5 years now. This year we won the championship. Our games are in the town he lives in, probably about a mile and a half from his house.
I always told my son the fact that I was willing to come and actually watch a soccer game proves that I loved him.
It’s a 90s childhood movie trope to test the humanity of the dad and add to the dramatic victimization of the child protagonist view.
There is a tv/movie trope regarding absentee dads not showing up to sporting events. It’s a way to convey that trope, is all. Parents are suppose to help the kids practice at home and encourage them at games. It’s part of parenting. Maybe that’s just how it is in the US, though.
My five year old 100% notices when me or my husband attend his events. He works really hard at what he does and wants us to see what he has spent all this time and hard work on. He also loves to show me how well he does on his spelling tests. It never occured to me that it would be cultural expectation lol.
Yeah when I was a kid my parents rarely came to any after school event. I played some sports and cheered and I didn’t mind a bit if my parent dropped me off and came back to pick me up. I was there to be with my friends. I did NOT have helicopter parents. I knew they loved me, but I also knew they didn’t want to be at everything I did and that was just fine.
It’s Hollywood bro
Youth Sports in America is a MUCH bigger deal than it is in commonwealth countries. It’s pretty common for a small town to basically shut down when there’s a big game at the high school. You’ll go up to a store or whatever and maybe there’s half the staff because everyone is at the game.
Something like children’s soccer is maybe a one parent activity but usually most people’s parent attend the games. It’s tied to dads specifically because there’s a sort of stereotype that your dad is the one helping you practice or run drills outside of official practice times and since he probably also played youth sports it’s a staple of Americana to go toss the ole pigskin or baseball with your dad while he gives you safe advice.
It’s not a big deal if your dad was a constant presence in your life. It’s a big deal if they NEVER come to your games because they aren’t really in your life
School sports are taken a bit more seriously in parts of the US. Football practice was five nights a week and six hours on Saturday. I worked my ASS off to be a starter.
It was the one thing I had that I was really proud of, and it always made me a little sad in the back of my head if my parents had to miss a game, even if there was a good reason.
As a counterpoint, I took off work last Friday to pick up my daughter for mid-semester break from University (3.5 hour drive each way). She was giving a presentation with her team as the final exam in a Civil Engineering class. I suggested that I’d like to get there early so I could watch her presentation.
She threatened to kill me on the spot if I did that.
>playing sport my dad would come to some games but I really didn’t care either way if he came or no
You say that because your parents came to some games, and you felt supported. I wonder if your dad never came to games if you actually wouldn’t have cared either way.
(There may be an exception to this is if you didn’t actually care about the activity you were doing.)
>dramatic shorthand for parental inattention or is it actually a big deal
As others have said, yes, it’s dramatic shorthand for parental inattention/*parental priorities* (as Dad is usually rushing from something else he either wanted to do, or had to do).
I’m a Father of 3 boys and haven’t missed a game and help coach. It’s fleeting so I’ve enjoyed every game and event. I consider myself lucky to have the time to do it.
Experienced this because my dad was in the military growing up. So having him come to pick me up from school or daycare actually meant something to me
So, if you *really really* want to know why, it’s because it’s often frowned upon for men to show emotion, especially in the 70s, 80s, 90s, and early 2000s. There’s so many tropes in sitcoms of dads not telling their kids they love them or being embarrassed to say “good job” or “I’m proud of you” and it’s the mom’s job to force the dad to say those things. I mean shit even in more recent years, just look at the kids movie “cloudy with a chance of meatballs”. It’s all about a dad not being able to effectively communicate his feelings towards his son.
This stereotype is true in life too, in everywhere except sports.
For some reason as a society we collectively agreed it’s super dope for a father to be stoked about his kid in sports. Art? No. Academics? Maybe in college. Hobbies? Yeah right. But sports? It’s one of the times your dad felt comfortable genuinely being excited about what you’re doing, and able to engage with you as more than a distant, slightly cold patriarch. Dad doesn’t have to be man of the house when you’re playing football, he can be your biggest fan. He can scream and shout and talk about how awesome you are and how proud he is and no one will question his masculinity for doing so. He can brag about you to his friends in ways he (traditionally) couldn’t about your painting or whatever.
So, for dad to show up to a game is a huge deal, because the game is an avenue for dad to express his love and appreciation of you in ways he cannot or will not elsewhere.
This of course isn’t a blanket statement for all dads, but irs common and relatable enough to make appearances in sitcoms and movies and TV shows throughout the ages of American media.
Tldr: showing love and affection is feminine and the department of mom everywhere except sports, so while you can pretend your dad is just distant but still loves you everywhere else, but if he comes to your sports game you can genuinely see that he does. Or if he skips it, that he doesn’t. At least that’s the trope.
Playing youth hockey in Massachusetts, we’d have 6am games sometimes 40 minutes away. God love my dad for driving me— otherwise they wouldn’t show and I wouldn’t mind.
Home games were at like 7pm, the rink was a 5 minute walk from my house— so my dad would go and sit in the scouts box and drink beers with the other hockey dads.
There are families whose who lives revolve around their kids’ sports. I know some. It’s insane to me.
The average work week in America is longer than in other developed countries, and the ‘American dream’ typically entails living in some suburb where the commute after work can be 2 hours with traffic.
So there are more opportunities for one’s careerism to bump up against family responsibilities, and the trope is usually that it was expected for the dad to not make the other games but then something at work came up to make him miss the one event he planned to be there for.
Middle school and high school sports are oftentimes held right after school. In a lot of families in the old days, when mom was at home, dad was at work until the evening. Leaving work early to come to a game was a big deal in those circumstances. Now, it has a different meaning with single parent homes and dads that don’t participate. Its a broad generalization but not every households experience.
that’s just a movie thing honestly
I think it’s mostly the tv /movie thing I don’t know anyone in real life who gave much of a shit tbh?