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Butterflies and Helicopters

July 9, 2014

I’m doing as much as I know how to attract butterflies to my garden. For example, I’ve planted a butterfly bush and milkweed plants. I do this because these plants are supposed to attract butterflies and bees, and I know butterflies and bees are essential to producing vegetables.

One of the greatest miracles any person can observe is to watch a butterfly emerge from a cocoon. It was as wondrous to me last summer as the first time I saw it occur when I was a young child, when I first saw a butterfly emerge with damp, shriveled wings. 

I was told then that we shouldn’t interfere, that we shouldn’t help the butterfly escape the cocoon and shouldn’t help spread the wings. We had to let the butterfly struggle. We were instructed that the struggle would give strength to the wings, and that would be essential to the butterfly’s survival.

Childhood is much like this, but too often helicopter parents intervene and interfere with the growth process and, ultimately, weaken their children’s ability to fend for themselves, to overcome adversity and to take flight.

Helicopter parents endanger our butterfly children.

Half Empty or Half Full

December 11, 2012

After an absence of decades, eight-player football has been reintroduced to Michigan high schools during recent years. When enough schools sponsored the program, the MHSAA responded with a four-week playoff in 2011.  The number of schools sponsoring the sport grew in 2012, and more growth is expected for the 2013 season.

Like almost everything that occurs in life, what has benefited some schools is not seen by others to be in their own best interests.

Advocates of the eight-player game include those schools whose declining enrollments couldn’t support the eleven-player game.  Football has returned to some communities and has been saved from the brink of elimination in others.

However, as two and soon three dozen Class D schools opt for the eight-player game, the remaining Class D schools that sponsor football find themselves in disrupted leagues and forced to travel further to complete eleven-player football schedules; and they must compete against larger teams in Division 8 of the eleven-player MHSAA Football Playoffs.

In fact, the growth of the eight-player game among our smallest schools has resulted in more Class D schools qualifying for the MHSAA Football Playoffs than ever before.  In 2012, an all-time high 44.0 percent of Class D schools that sponsor football qualified for either the single division eight-player tournament or Division 8 of the eleven-player tournament.  This compares to 42.2 percent of Class C schools, 44.9 percent of Class B schools and 41.6 percent of Class A schools that sponsor football and qualified for the 2012 playoffs.

Some see the eight-player game as the savior of the football experience in Class D schools.  Others see it differently.