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How the World Cup Helps Me Connect With My Teenage Son
Soccer has become our shared language, bridging the gap when ordinary conversation proves difficult
The author and her son watched Lionel Messi play in Paris in April 2023. Mutual love of soccer is one of the ways they connect and communicate.
AARP (Getty Images, 2; Courtesy Donna Freydkin, 3)
A teenage son can live in your house and still feel like a rumor.
He comes upstairs when he is hungry. Or when he needs a ride. Or when he wants to have a sleepover. “Is there any food in this house?” can sum up the entirety of our daily interaction.
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You can love him with everything you have and still spend half your day trying to reach him.
Soccer is the one door that tends to be open.
This summer, the World Cup has made that opening a little wider. My son, Alex, and I watch games together. We argue about players, national teams, missed penalties and strikers who shoot when the obvious pass is begging to be made. The conversations are not deep. They do not need to be.
I grew up loving soccer. Alex wanted nothing to do with it.
So I signed him up for a peewee team when he was 5 and offered to coach, on the theory that a kid is more likely to stay on the field when his parent is standing there.
Alex did not see it as a gift. Before the first game, he screamed and cried and dug in. I more or less hauled him to Brooklyn’s Prospect Park against his will, telling myself the whole walk over that I knew better than a sobbing 5-year-old about what he would end up loving.
By the end of the second game, he was in.
For two years, I stood on the sideline with a whistle, a bag of balls and no illusion that anyone out there was listening all that closely to my coaching. The kids were small enough to trip over the ball, run the wrong way and look over at their parents after every kick. I loved the chaos of it. The little cleats. The postgame orange slices. Eleven children chasing one ball like it held the secrets of the universe.
The boy I’d dragged there crying turned into one of the kids who did not want practice to end.
When the World Cup does the talking
I have watched every World Cup since 1986, when I was heading into my senior year at Munich American High School in Germany.
I was in our apartment in Munich in 1990 when West Germany beat Argentina 1-0 in the final. I still remember what came after: the streets filling up, the car horns that did not stop, the feeling that an entire country had been holding its breath.
Now Alex is the one telling me what I need to know about the 2026 World Cup. Most of the time we disagree in the low-stakes, highly specific way soccer allows. We never settle on who is more fun to watch: Germany’s Jamal Musiala or Spain’s Lamine Yamal. He takes Yamal. I take Musiala. Neither of us is moving.
I think France’s Kylian Mbappé is the best player alive right now. Alex thinks that argument is too obvious. He explains why Germany’s Kai Havertz is useful even when he is annoying, and why France’s Ousmane Dembélé is a clutch player after his hat trick against Norway on June 26. We both agree that Argentina’s Lionel Messi is a beast, still scoring gorgeous goals at 39. I root for Germany because I do not know how not to. He isn’t convinced.
Showing up, game after game
Alex plays travel soccer now, and I go to every game.
Every single one.
There are early alarms, gross coffee, dubious public bathrooms and long drives to New Jersey or Long Island fields with no shade, no parking and, somehow, always a faint smell of sewage. I have stood through all of it. I have watched him sprint and defend and improve in ways I can see from a hundred feet away. I have watched him get frustrated, shake it off and go back in.
On the field, he is still my kid. He is also, more and more, somebody separate from me, someone with his own way of moving through a problem.
On the way to games, he hypes himself up by listening to music, headphones on. I am the mode of transportation. His maternal Uber driver. Mostly I assume my presence is background noise. Then one afternoon, in the kitchen, he let me know it wasn’t.
I was reaching for his water bottle, already thinking about the drive, the traffic, the nightmare of parking, and he half-turned to me and said, “I really like it when you’re at my games.”
I handed him the water bottle. We left for the field. Parking was, as ever, a disaster.
I have thought about that moment more times than I can count.
The World Cup final is still a few weeks away. Germany lost to Paraguay on June 29, in a penalty shootout, and I will hear about it for a month. For now, soccer gives us the ball and a little open space.
Sometimes that is enough.
AARP essays share a point of view in the author’s voice, drawn from expertise or experience, and do not necessarily reflect the views of AARP.
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