The meeting that took place on Wednesday 8 October at the Quirinale between the President of the Republic and the two volleyball teams – men’s and women’s – who recently established themselves as “world champions” has not only a symbolic value. The meeting was not just a celebration of the victory. But it also served to share enormously valuable messages on the topic of growing up and growing up with the educational, sporting and parental world. In particular, the words pronounced by Anna Danesi, captain of the women’s team, represent, today more than ever, a warning for all girls: “Do sport, in your free time, during the day, in the evening and if necessary even at night. Don’t listen to those who say that sport is the enemy of studying, because sport trains concentration, strengthens the body and the mind and will give you that determination that will also help you in the classroom. We have many examples of champions of the volleyball who managed to successfully complete their school career without ever having to choose between a dream and education.”
Those of Danesi are very important words. We are in the era of the “anxious generation”. We raise children who have an intense fragility that prevents them from facing life, putting themselves on the line. And this way of saying “get involved” must be understood in the most literal sense of the term. Because today growth is deprived of fundamental experiences that must be carried out within real life. It is played, but within multiplayer communities and not in a park or courtyard. We socialize, but on social media rather than in real life. We are constantly distracted by having a screen always on and always in our hand and we distance ourselves from all those activities that require cognitive commitment, study first and foremost.
Unfortunately, the overdose of instant gratification to which our children are exposed distances us from the idea of commitment, effort and sacrifice that sports training recognizes as essential prerequisites.
We parents of the third millennium should print Anna Danesi’s words and hang them in our children’s rooms. Today there is a need to put the developmental age back at the center of a true educational community where family and school interact with agencies that know how to support the developmental needs of children and young people in a concrete and competent way. The parish is needed and sport is needed, because two areas of growth that are very deprived today are those that concern the physical and spiritual dimensions. We have growth that is increasingly disembodied and emptied of nourishment for what is inside the hearts and minds of our children. The buffet we have laid out for their lives is full of excitement and instant gratificationa true Toyland in which our children risk getting lost, no longer finding the main path for their growth. This is why Anna Danesi’s words must become the mantra of parents of the third millennium.
