Role Models

If you think footballers should be role models for your or other peoples kids, you're a fu.cking idiot.

 

whether they should be is irrelevant they are.

 

Any parent who thinks kids don't look up to footballers, film stars or pop stars is naive.

 

How does that work? No one chooses footballers as role models. The fact they are in the public domain where millions of kids watch them makes them role models. A role model is what a child aspires to be. I might choose who I want as a role model for my child when they are born, but I know already my role models weren't the ones my parents chose for me.

Bit nasty to call people F.cking idiots too. Any need? You need a better role model pal. Clearly yours are footballers...

 

Role models should be parents, grandparents and family - not some guy who can kick a ball in a net. Children need to be taught that whilst you can admire someone's skill in being good at what they do, looking up to that person and basing them as an actual role model is futile at best, nonsensical at worst. Footballers aren't going to guide your kids through life changing events. They aren't going to instill them with good behaviour, teach them respect, decency to others and they aren't going to teach them the value of money!

Im sure it didn't used to be this way. And if it didn't used to be, it means it doesn't have to be.

 

What an odd thing to say. We don't push footballers as role models for kids. Kids choose their own and those interested in football choose footballers. Just like those interested in film choose actors and those interested in music choose pop stars. No one thinks footballers should be, they just are.

 

Im not saying you can't admire a footballer - but that's different from allowing a situation to develop where they base their role in life on a footballer.

 

It's so naive that mate. Kids don't have pictures of parents and grandparents on their wall, they have posters of footballers, actors and pop stars. You spend much of your time as a kid trying to do exactly the opposite of what your parents tell you to do. If you can't remember that I can't believe you've ever been one. Footballers are not good role models, but they are and the more a parent tries to push them away from that the more they push them towards it. You can explain, but you can't make kids listen. And it's always been like that, certainly was when I was a kid.

 

An odd thing to say? All that idolatry of footballers/celebrities in the media must be my imagination then?

 

And that's us doing that is it? Or is it the media? No one you are addressing is suggesting footballers should be role models, we're just saying that they are. If you think the media is a load of **** obsessed with celebrity, that's a different argument and you won't get anyone arguing against it.

 

You're confusing two issues, and as i've already said, there's no harm in admiring footballers or any sports people. There's no harm in pretending to be a footballer whilst kicking the ball round at school.

But to elevate that idea into them actually being role models is plain daft.

 

Well I hear plenty of parents banging on about how footballers should be role models - so yes it is (and it can be both).

 

We're not doing that. No one is. Kids choose themselves, we can't control it.

 

I've never heard that. I've heard people say that footballers should act more responsibly because they are role models to our children but I've never once heard a parent say that footballers should be role models for kids.

 

These two ideas are not mutually exclusive. No?

 

**** I wished I'd spoken to you before. My eldest daughter liked Hannah Montana, ergo I've been encouraging her to try and emulate the evolution of Miley Cyrus. Maybe I've made a mishtake.

 

You've lost me.

Many parents have accepted that, despite their warnings to the contrary, their children have chosen footballers as their role models (or pop stars, film stars, Che Guevara or Vincent Vega). So, parents have argued that footballers, with that responsibility on their shoulders, should be better behaved. What I've never heard of, but what you seem to be arguing, is that parents sit down with their little Jonny and tell him to ignore what they tell him, what his grandparents tell him, what his teachers tell him and just follow the example of Titus Bramble. It just doesn't happen.

Parents don't want footballers to be role models to their children, but they've accepted it has happened and that resistance is futile, so they ask footballers to ******* behave themselves.

 

I think this solves the debate

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Role_model

 

Pretty sure I heard a journalist say almost exactly the same thing on Radio5 just after 8 this morning. I think we are looking at this wrong though - footballers should be aiming to present the kind of positive role model that kids should aspire too. Ex-players liks Bobby Hassell and Bruce Dyer have both put lots of time and effort into helping local charities. This should be normal for top players. We should want our kids to emulate these players not just because they are top sports people, but because they make a positive difference to the world...

 

Speaking from recent experience kids do copy the behaviour of (in this case footballers) famous people. In the school I work in, post world cup/Suarez the playground/PE lessons had a good few 'biting incidents'. It'd never happened once previously. A small example but one that shows that it doesn't go unnoticed by the impressionable.