The Matt Siegel Challenge

Instilling in children one’s own passions and values has been a parental challenge for generations.  How do we ensure that our kids grow up to believe some of the integral beliefs we hold?  How do we teach our kids that some family traditions aren’t negotiable, that they’re not up for debate?  The social-cultural milieu is a scary place where things that are important to parents get drowned out in the cacophonous diarrhea that is Justin Bieber (for example).  How do parents fight back against that while still giving kids the ability to choose?

On a personal level, how can I teach my children the joys (and, unfortunately, heartbreaks) of loyalty to a sports team?  Specifically, how can I instill in my two daughters that the Oakland A’s are our family’s favorite baseball team and, therefore, they should care about them (besides repeating it as fact over and over)?  And beyond instilling that they’re our favorites, what I really want my daughters to understand are the emotional reactions to the A’s.  Joy, happiness, contentment when they win.  Sadness, anger, stomach pain when they lose.  I want to share with my daughters what it’s like to really love a team, not simply have some peripheral affinity because their dad keeps putting the team’s t-shirts on them and mumbling this about some guy nicknamed “Godzilla”.

The answer is quite simple, actually: Classic Conditioning.  Family and friends, welcome to the Matt Siegel Challenge!

The Challenge's namesake, with a romantic beach backdrop.

Named in honor of one of my closest and most imaginative friends who came up with the premise at the age of 19 (yes, I’m making a long-term parenting decision based off the advice of a 19 year-old who used to take Oreo cookies, break them apart, pour milk on them, and declare it cereal), the Matt Siegel Challenge is really quite simple.  When the A’s win, the girls get a treat.  When the A’s lose, I punch them.  Just kidding!  Well, partially.  When the A’s win, I will give them a small treat or prize (lollipop, pencil, whatever.  I’m open to suggestions…) but when they lose, I’ll simply tell them with an overly dramatic sad face that the A’s lost and that there will be no joy in Mudville, err, Tucson this afternoon.  The idea is that by the late summer, the A’s will become viscerally integrated into their psyches and they’ll feel the drool of saliva when they see this:

"And here's a pound of refined sugar for each of you."

And the pains of sadness when they see this:

"Oh, that's so sad, the A's are losing. Looks like it's celery and tonic water for dessert if this keeps up."

Frankly, I don’t see how this won’t work.  And fortunately for the girls, Vegas has the A’s win total this year at 83.5 (-125 on the over), so according to the bookmakers the girls are good for at least 83 days of reinforced goodness.  I don’t see how this is a bad idea at all.  The girls win because they get happy when the A’s win.  I win because I get happy when the A’s win and I get happy to watch my girls develop a love for the A’s.  Sonya wins because I’m actually teaching our children something worthwhile, for once.

The Oakland Athletics. Welcoming children and the Taliban as fans since 1968.

Maybe you feel this is a bit manipulative.  Maybe you think my children should be free to choose whichever team they like or, perhaps, that they should be able to choose if they even like rooting for teams in the first place.  Maybe they should have “agency” (rolling my eyes and doing finger quotes) over themselves and shouldn’t be subjected to their dad’s “forced” (mocking you incessantly) baseball games.  Maybe you should mind your own business and check in with me in fifteen years when your kid chooses with his own free will to vote for Sarah Palin because she’s the hottest 60 year-old ever and she can use a three-syllable word semi-consistently.

By the time the girls are old enough to tell Yankee fans to “Fuck off,” I’m hoping the conditioning, err, Matt Siegel Challenge will have paid off.  And by then, I’m considering altering the Matt Siegel Challenge to include money for Friday and Saturday nights spent with dad watching the A’s play.  Until then, cue the dum-dums, I suppose (the lollipop, asshole, not me).