To be a bit sad that my parents didn't push me more as a child?

[Cleopatramanuf]

I've been reflecting on everything lately and feel a bit sad, like I've missed out on things which I could have been really great at and enjoyed.

For example, in primary school, I was very good at athletics. I was always chosen to represent my school at athletics competitions and would often get through to the final against the best other kids in the (very large) county and win. My sports teacher at the time was always telling me and my parents that I have great aptitude and that I should really keep up athletics after leaving primary school. My high school didn't have any athletics and so I asked my parents if I could go to one out of school. They agreed but I was very shy and came home and told them that I enjoyed it but felt shy. Rather than encouraging me to keep going, my mum just said 'oh well, you should quit then, no fun to be doing it on your own'. Now I wish she'd encouraged me to stick at it, I could have done really well!

Another thing, gymnastics as a child. I loved it. My mum stopped taking me because the centre was a bit grimy. I begged her to let me carry on but she just said no after that rather than looking for a different centre for me to go to.

Another example, I went to a cycling velodrome as a kid with a friend's parent and won loads of the races. The instructor came up to my friend's mum specifically to tell her that I showed real possibility and should go back. When she told my mum, my mum just scoffed and said 'bet they say that to all the kids' and left it there. I never got to go back.

A further one, when I was studying for my GCSEs, I told her that I wanted to be either a doctor or a vet. She immediately told me that I wasn't clever enough for that which really demotivated me when revising. I still did very well and in hindsight, with her encouragement, would have had a very good chance of getting into these careers. I am actually pretty bright!

There's so many similar examples and whenever I watch competitions or videos of all these people talking about their life or competing at a high level, I get a twinge of sadness that that maybe could have been me. I feel sad that she didn't push me to develop my talents and encourage me to reach my goals.

All the motivation in the world will get you nowhere as a child if you have no parental support to get you there
Bollocks. There are thousands of people who succeed at all sorts of things despite unsupportive parents or in some cases any parents at all. So you parents wouldn’t ferry you to gymnastics club and pay for it. So fucking what? You have no idea the shit people drag themselves out of.

You get one life OP, burn it how you like.

@Hairy you're paying for and encouraging your child to do a sport she likes. I did not have that. My mother was also emotionally abusive which I have had counselling and have come to terms with. I am now just trying to get over the lack of opportunities and wasted talent I had as a child. I am not claiming I had the worst childhood in the world, far from it. I just feel a bit sad that the way I was parented has prevented me from achieving what I could have been great at.

Nonetheless, I am trying to take control of things and look to the future!

@itwould sounds good in theory, but how should I have gotten myself and paid for my gymnastics as a 7 year old? Any practical ideas?

but I often watch the commonwealth games or Olympics and dream that it could have been me. I know my chances were probably small anyway but I wish I'd been able to give it a shot.

It is a virtual racing certainly it wouldn't have been. From what you said in your first posts, you were good at sport, but nowhere near elite level. A friend was ranked number 2 at Tennis in a large US state, from the age of about six she was hothoused by her parents, trained and every waking moment devoted to tennis. She came to loathe the sport and quit in her late teens after her mother pushed her to the point of breakdown. She was extremely good although in the US alone there were 100 odd people in her age group who were as good as her. Widen that out to people within a five year age range and there are 1000s of people who are going to compete with you and broadly thr same level for a tiny number of spaces for pros, Fed cup places, enteries for major tournaments etc. No one she was on the circuit with in her age category made it to the heights of grand slams etc.

There's an elite within an elite with natural talent, drive and parental support and financial resources at their disposal. You were deprived of the first three, but from what you've written you were sporty, vut not anywhere near the amount of natural talent or potential to reach elite level.

I realise this sounds harsh, but you seem obsessed by what might have been, rather than dealing with your life as it is and working from there.

@Funky I understand that but as I wrote earlier, I was better than a girl who now is in the running to be taking part in the Commonwealth Games, so there clearly was a level of aptitude there!

Well my “idea” would be to accept that your parents weren’t willing to subsidise your ludicrously expensive and time consuming hobby on the off chance you could have competed for your country and then got on with leading your life and earn a living. Are you cross you couldn’t have a few ponies and play polo too?

That’s all fine though, your parents sound negative and perhaps they did hold you back but they aren’t in charge of you anymore.

You can’t forgive people that don’t want your forgiveness, the counselling needs to help you try and deal with that anger and sadness and be more productive now you can be.

You could’ve been that girl you are talking about, and you might have had a catastrophic injury that meant it went nowhere - fantasy counter factuals only hold you back.

My parents did their best, but they were veey dysfunctional and a key lesson I learnt was to get away from them and concentrate on my own life, now.

I think the danger is if you allow this lack of support early on to define you for the rest of your life. That would just confirm their pessimistic attitude that you were never going to achieve anything anyway.

You're not too old to start training seriously for long distance running or cycling. I mean, you probably won't make it to the Olympics, but you could definitely compete at a pretty high level. If you wanted to. That's the thing, OP, it's no good looking back and wishing your parents had pushed you to succeed. It's your life. If you want to succeed, you have to go out and make it happen.

Worrying about the road not travelled really is the thief of time.

From your initial post it wasn't easy to see the motivation of your parents which could have actually come from kindness. Your later comments suggest not.

You really need to try and concentrate on 'what's next' rather than what could have been.

I’m astonished that you’ve received counseling for your childhood but hold such a resentment over something relatively minuscule. Could this be something to explore or perhaps revisit counseling? I really rate CBT.

It’s not that I don’t “get it”, trust me I do. I had no prospects and had a very damaging childhood and I know what it’s like to see how school friends lives went in much more marvelous directions but you need to let go and forgive and you have to take the reigns now. You’re steering the ship.
We’d all be driven mad if we thought of everything people “stole” from us!
Think Fairytale of New York. There’s going to be loads of people who’ll “stand in the way of your dreams” over the years.

I used to say if I hadn’t had DD I’d have travelled the world but lots of people travelled before the age I was when I had her and lots of people travel with a young baby, I didn’t.

I recommend you read autobiographies of people who overcame devastating home lives, abuse, trauma and adversity but went on to achieve great things.

Forgive. Take responsibility for the now. Steer your own ship.

To be perfectly honest, the chances of you reaching international levels in any of these sports would have been vanishingly small. And personality would have mattered at least as much as talent.

But sport isn’t just about Olympic medals, it’s far more important as an enjoyable, healthy leisure activity. Take it up now, throw yourself into it, enjoy it.

Equally with the degree. If you want it, go and do it. A friend of mine put herself through an undergrad, masters and PhD while working full time as a mature student. It’s more than achievable.

Haiku, successful people don’t sit around blaming others. They take life into their own hands.

Happy not haiku

Oh FGS. The OP’s parents sound horrible. The whole ‘you would have found a way’ is bollocks. HOW? How as a 7/8/9 year old would she have played any sport or had the means to do this?
Some parents are pushy. And some are neglectful and the OP’s parents clearly sound like that. It’s onviously bringing out the insecurity in everyone here but unless you actively tell your children they are not good enough and stop them from enjoying their hobbies then you are not like the OP’s mother.
GEM is v v v competitive and will mean going into debt. The OP can do that but it is not a career pathway to be taken lightly and has financial conseqences (the OP may not have resources to fall back on).
This is just a different version of telling poor people that only if they worked harder they could be earning 6 figure salaries.

Most of us could have been pushed more as children. It is easy to think we all could have been Olympic athletes or concert pianists if we had been supported more, but the reality is most of us would not, regardless of early aptitude. Regrets are pointless, unless they motivate us to do something positive now.

You are still young and have time to achieve solid goals like retraining in medicine or becoming an excellent athlete - your parents are not holding you back, what you achieve is limited only by you.

"A further one, when I was studying for my GCSEs, I told her that I wanted to be either a doctor or a vet. She immediately told me that I wasn't clever enough for that which really demotivated me when revising"

I sympathise with the earlier childhood stuff to an extent, but by GCSE age you were of an age to prove your mother wrong, surely. My own parents have no education, and come from very deprived backgrounds. They sent me to the awful parish school 'because it's good enough for everyone else', were never able to help with homework because they were semi-literate themselves, told me aged 11 that university was 'only for rich people' and 'we could never afford that', so that I put it out of my head entirely. Because my school almost never sent anyone to university either, as the teachers were demotivated and mostly taken up with stopping fights, no one thought I had anything going for me there either, despite good marks -- in fact, they were more embarrassed than proud at my final exam results in case people thought they were 'above ourselves'.

BUT you can't rely on other people to motivate you. I got the forms myself and applied for university, and filled out the forms to sit scholarship exams and for grants, and I ended up at Oxford, and have four degrees. You can't let other people's opinion of you deflect you.

Sorry, it was my parents who were embarrassed by my final school exam results, not the teachers. The Head grabbed the results envelope out of my hand, and told me I was wasting the grades I'd got on the wrong degree course.

My mother was emotionally and physically abusive and pushed me at everything! Not sport because she didn't see that as useful but in every other area she was demanding, punitive (horribly) and often unrealistic. Yes I was clever and had real talent in a few areas, but she was after perfection. In the end I ran away at 17. Chucked everything in.
Had a baby within the year.
It took me years and years into adulthood to stop being frightened of her and to genuinely not feel like a disappointment any more.
Be careful what you wish for.
And don't go through adulthood blaming your parents. Acknowledging what was done wrong and being upset about it is fine, but I learned early on that all the people still moaning about their parents seen to get "stuck" in a cycle where even as adults nothing is their fault/responsibility. They don't grow up properly. I'm not saying this is you but it's something to beware of
You're young, clever, get up, dust yourself off and pursue your goals. You've vented your hurt and disappointment which us your right. Now use that to motivate yourself.
I'm sure you can achieve all kinds of things.

‘Ludicrously expensive and time consuming hobbies’. What bollocks. She was good. Her parents simply didn’t encourage her. How would we ever know what the OP would have done if her parents hadn’t encouraged her?
Honestly the attitudes here are awful. My son does something aged 7 at a reasonably high level. It requires enormous parental support not to mention money. However while he’s good he’s not a prodigy and while it may be his career he’s never going to be an international superstar at it. So why do we support him? Because HE loves it. Because HE gets enjoyment from it. If he didn’t he wouldn’t practise 2+ hours a day with little encouragement. He gets pleasure from it and to facilitate that is also my job as a parent.
I mean why buy loads of books? It’s time consuming. Expensive. And your children may not even grow up to be clever or interesting right?

Honestly.

My DH wasn't encouraged to do anything at all. It wasn't a lack of money, it was my FIL not thinking that DH would be any good at anything. DH really wanted to learn an instrument, but FIL vetoed it on that grounds that he'd probably be rubbish, and you didn't need lessons to learn an instrument. He wanted to learn how to swim but again was vetoed because MIL hated swimming and DH would probably not like it.

I wasn't allowed to do any sports at all because DM said I was too fat, and she thought that sport would damage intellectual prowess. Preposterous but the space in which I grew up.

And fwiw OP, I think it's normal to reach a point in your life when you think deeply about your past, and reflect on what could have been. My DM in particular did many things when I was growing up that I now know are not normal or healthy and that have affected me: I had a horrific time at work that surfaced a lot of feelings from my childhood that I'd buried.

Oh FGS. The OP’s parents sound horrible.

It’s true that they don’t sound great, but what’s the point in dwelling on their inadequacies?

My parents, while very supportive, were poor. They couldn’t afford lots of opportunities for me, so I didn’t get them, even though I would have benefitted hugely.

Should I be berating them for not having better jobs? Of course not. I made the best of what I had.

Honestly the attitudes here are awful.

I don't think anyone is suggesting that the OP had the best parents in the world. And yes, if they had been more supportive, probably things would have been different. But it's still extremely unlikely that she would have been an elite athlete, because even with all the support in the world, most children who show promise don't make it. And, more often than you'd think, those who do make do so despite their circumstances, rather than because of them.

But mostly the attitude on this thread seems to be rightly pointing out that looking back on what might have been is really unhelpful. Looking forward and taking charge of her own life now is what will help the OP most.

I think we can all look back at our childhoods and wish our parents had done things differently. I remember vowing to do it things better with my daughter, but that's before I became a parent and realised how hard it can be. I once went out with a guy who treated me badly then cried it wasn't his fault, it was because his dad had left when he was a toddler. I got a bit fed up of him not taking responsibility for himself as an adult. So basically YANBU to feel disappointed but you're w grown up now- step up and take control of your life. If you're smart enough to be a vet, go do it. If you're good enough for athletics join a local club- you might not make it, you might not have made it if you'd been pushed at 7, but at least you can tell yourself that what happened in the past doesn't have to influence your forever

I often watch the commonwealth games or Olympics and dream that it could have been me. I know my chances were probably small anyway but I wish I'd been able to give it a shot

I think most of us have a bit of "If only..........." in our lives, but it's probably more productive to look forward rather than back

If you had Olympic potential for biking, gymnastics, track and field, and running, and the smarts to be either a doctor or veterinarian, I've got to ask, what did you become?