What to do when your daughter loses interest?

WARRIORMIKE said:

When you were younger, didn't you guys use smoke singles as text?

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Funny story. My friend (and his parents) was too cheap to pay the 25 cents for the pay phone so when he needed to call his
parents he would call collect and they had a set of keywords they would use for various things so the parents needn't accept the call...

WARRIORMIKE said:

When you were younger, didn't you guys use smoke singles as text?

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No smoke signals, but the phone on the wall of the kitchen had a cord about a mile long.

Eric F said:

No smoke signals, but the phone on the wall of the kitchen had a cord about a mile long.

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Rotary phone too huh?

WARRIORMIKE said:

Rotary phone too huh?

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You betcha. Harvest gold.

Classof2020 said:

We have gone through a bit of that. Ours has generally been related to personality clashes with coaches that she would dread to see, but then once she got there and the endorphins start pumping and she works with the team she is great. But mine is definitely an introvert and stresses about the interactions until she gets there and gets going. She is also a bit of a perfectionist so that can be a struggle in team sports - nothing is going to be perfect.

I do push mine a bit because I see the same things you do most of the time - she comes home energized, I mostly see her having a lot of fun on the field and enjoying much more than she complains about. I feel like between her and me we'll figure out when it's time for me to stop encouraging her to stick with it.

In relationship to HS ball I told her we want her to commit to two years and if she wants to quit we'll support that decision. But as a pitcher in the shadow of an ace senior she was put in JV to get a lot of pitching time and JV is bad rec ball. So I figured one year at varsity before we make any major decisions. We just keep taking it one season at a time and reassessing.

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Thanks to everybody for chiming in, really appreciate to hear your perspective. I'm responding to this one directly because the lines I have bolded are eerily accurate to what we are going through.

pattar said:

Funny story. My friend (and his parents) was too cheap to pay the 25 cents for the pay phone so when he needed to call his
parents he would call collect and they had a set of keywords they would use for various things so the parents needn't accept the call...

Click to expand...

I did that too.

My college had no phones in the room, and the phones in the hall could only make campus or local calls, but they could accept long distance. The pay phones could accept long distance calls, but they were sometimes in inconvenient places.

My college was in Pennsylvania, my parents in Arkansas, and I sometimes had long distance relationships with ladies in places like Mass. or Hawaii. We had all sorts of signals worked out, whether they were supposed to call me back on the hall phone or the pay phone or just ignore the call. I think if I used Lopaka (Robert in Hawaiian) it meant for my then girlfriend to call me on the hall phone, but if I used Bob, she was to call me on the pay phone, but if I used Robert it meant emergency please take the call. Wonder why that relationship didn't last very long.

My DD 1 is quite an extrovert, so that isn't her issue.
She had a lot of talent in softball, but she played just for the fun of it. She loved rec league. When she played some tournaments with a little league all-star team, she loved that as well. At some point, it became stressful, and stressful wasn't fun anymore. And her teams were losing a lot.

Fall of 8th grade she played 12U little league.
Spring of 8th grade she played 14U little league.
Summer after 8th grade she played 14U all-stars, played in a couple of tournaments.
Fall of 9th grade she was on a 16U TB team.

That's right. She went from 12U little league to 16U TB in one year. That was WAY too much for her, since she just wanted to hang with her friends. So she quit TB, played that spring for a freshman team in HS, then her friends wanted to stop playing, so there wasn't any more fun for her, and she quit. She claims she never thinks about her softball days, but I took over her room as my office when she went to college. I see a few softball trophies here.

All I know is, when I pushed her, she quit. When I stopped pushing her, and let her make her own choice, she decided to play one more time. Then she quit when she was really ready to quit.

I was disappointed when she quit. Her coaches were disappointed when she quit. But, she has made a great life for herself post softball.
She finished her freshman year of college a few hours ago, on her way home from the dorms as I write. She is a pre-med biochem major on a full academic scholarship at Wisconsin

Oops, gotta help DD 1 carry in her stuff.

Friend of mine during a similar discussion about DD not interested in playing this summer junior to senior yr. She also seems to be waining from any thought of college ball as op. He made a statment a statement I found interesting "she may regret not playing summer, she may regret not playing college, neither of those decesion's if wrong are life altering, but lesson learned for choices in life that will be fAR more important".

I have seen some girls who quit not because they have lost interest but because they got burned out with playing so much. They played year round with not much rest. Sometimes a small break away from everything softball is all they need. I know with my DD it didn't take long for her to miss playing when she did have these small breaks.

I'd let her stop playing. But I don't know your situation. My niece took a year off of travel last year and did nothing. She's doing rec ball
Now and happy as can be.