One Parenting Moment: Kids And Their Brackets
— -- My favorite annual sports tradition with my kids occurs when the NCAA basketball tournament men's and women's brackets come out.
I print out paper copies of each, sharpen a few pencils and hand them over to my kids.
The resulting quilt of hand-lettered picks, funky school abbreviations and sense of ownership by the kids is a priceless piece of parenting memorabilia. I have saved my kids' brackets from the first March they could form individual letters clearly enough to fill in "U-K" or "M-S-U." (Sigh: Yes, begrudgingly, even "D-U-K-E.")
Sunday night, my 7-year-old and I sat in his bed and pored over the new bracket, pick by pick. He leaned on seedings (not bad) and the gaudiness of a team's record (ack, no!). He loves 3-point shooting, so he went long on Villanova -- I couldn't bring myself to tell him about Nova's propensity to underperform in March.
He is also 7, so he enthusiastically penciled in a huge "X" for Xavier all the way to the Final Four, not on the strength of their tourney-tested coach Archie Miller or their impressive season-long résumé, but because he loves the "X-Men" superheroes. There are more deluded ways to pick your bracket -- just check in with your colleague who went to Yale.
My oldest kid, who is 10, has been filling out brackets on his own for a few years now. Last year, he started diving into more online research and thinking about more quantifiable things like offensive and defensive efficiency, pace, 3-point and free throw percentages. (Sadly, he has clearly inherited his dad's propensity to pick teams he saw perform well on TV during the regular season.)
My 4-year-old daughter has finally mastered her letters enough to make her way through a bracket this year for the first time. I will read her the team names and hope she doesn't gigglingly latch onto the sound of "Austin Peay" as her pick over Kansas (let alone all the way to the Final Four, which as any parent of a 4-year-old will know is a very real threat).
The kids come by their bracket obsession honestly. The family's resident bracketologist is their mom, a savant who on our first date talked about team offensive rebounding as a cornerstone of her consistently superlative selection strategy.
This isn't about entering your kids' picks in a pool or introducing them to the quasi-legitimized world of March Madness games among you and your friends or co-workers. Not at all. That is entirely unnecessary for the kids. Save everyone the trouble and keep the fun in its purest form:
*A paper print-out of the women's and men's brackets.
*A sharpened pencil.
*A magnet to post the completed pages on the fridge, no less than you'd hang a beautiful piece of artwork that came home from school.
Once the brackets are complete, start a morning ritual over the next two weeks to let your kid apply a big affirmative "check" next to correct picks and a glaring "X" next to the misses. Let them compete, not with that obsessive colleague down the hall in marketing, but with you and their siblings, just for fun.
Nothing symbolizes the thrilling, open possibilities in life like an empty bracket -- let alone that moment Thursday morning just before things tip off when, with a childlike mindset of your own, you think maybe, just maybe, this is the year you get them all right.
Let your kids experience that kind of madness.
Find printable copies here for the men's tournament and the women's tournament. Follow Dan Shanoff on Twitter and Instagram at @danshanoff or join the conversation with him on Facebook.