I need help on ideas here.TL;DR - My son and I have almost zero items of interest in common. I feel like its driving me into depression and hurting my marriage and life overall.The longer story:Growing up there was nothing I ever wanted to do more than play sports. I wanted my fathers attention to play sports and help me with them. Being one of 7 kids my father had zero time to spare while trying to provide for a large family and keep the house and cars up and running. Being one of the older kids I was able to do a few things with him but as more kids came along this pretty much stopped all together and my little brothers basically had zero to no father/son time. I spent all of my time as a kid shooting hoops by myself. I was old enough to become the defacto babysitter to my littlest brother and spent a lot of time working with him on sports and he went on to play football in college, coincidentally out of all my little brothers he is the only one that turned out successful. The others have succumbed to alcoholism, drug abuse, and in general are still supported by the family and society rather than contributing to society. The effects of not having a father figure around for my brothers was very obvious to me and I made a conscious choice to have a career that provide both enough money and time to be around for my children.As I mentioned earlier sports has been huge in my life. I played college basketball and it has provided me friends, exercise, and a community to be involved with. It is my outlet for stress and my hobby and my passion as well. I married a college volleyball player, and my mother n law played college volleyball and my brother in law was a starter on a national championship football team at the college level. I married into a sports family. My life revolves around sports. I currently am heavily involved in extreme sports doing professional stunts. I believe that for me to be engaged and focused on something it has to have a higher level of intensity or adrenaline or I just do not find it interesting. I think this is a common genetic trait among extreme sport athletes.It goes without saying that my boy was born with a ball in his hand. I placed it there and really had expectations that he would naturally gravitate towards sports. I understand those are my expectations, not my sons, and its a recipe for disaster, but that was where I ended up being. This was life for me. As he got older I played him in all sorts of various sports to help him pick and choose where he wanted to go. He is not a natural athlete like mom and dad at all. I've had to work with him for any skill that he has. I am completely committed to spending as much time working on sports as he wants. I do push a little bit, I think its healthy to be pushed to grow, but I try and error on the side of caution verses forcing sports upon him. He is a terrible runner, in form, and in quickness. He will not work with me to correct it at all. Trying to get him to play catch with me feels like I am torturing the poor kid. I coach all of his sports teams (and my daughters) that between practices and games planning and prep leave me about zero time for anything personal, which I am 100% ok with. I have formed great friendships with other kids and their parents from this and have watched several kids develop into all stars under my tutelage. I should note, that I pushed him enough to make the all star baseball team this spring (which I also coach).My son is not interested in any of it. He is smart as a whip and just placed in the top 5 students nationally on the standardized test. He can do any multiplication for numbers under 20 and is a rock star in math at 6 years old. Lets be honest those are real world skills that I absolutely love and encourage. School work above all else and I am super excited about how smart he is. His reading skills are off the charts. He loves science, chess, arts and crafts, painting, legos, robots. All of which I love that he is interested in. At 6 years old he can do computer programming with logical steps (there are incredible STEM programming stuff out there people). The problem is I cannot relate to him at all on these items. I find them so boring I want to gouge my eyes out. I end up distracting myself from them by looking at my phone or checking ballgame scores. I end up not being able to engage with my son on these activities. We will sit down to play legos and I start falling asleep.I got him a motorcycle and pedal bike to go out with me. I try and take him camping, fishing, hiking, anything outdoors. He just isn't into it. His neighbor friends come over to play catch, shoot hoops, ride the motorcycle with me. I have to tell them that they only get to do what my son wants to do. His best friend reminds me of my littlest brother. He is the youngest of 6 and one hell of an athlete. He gets zero attention from mom or dad and roams the neighborhood doing whatever. He is constantly asking me to play catch or ride motorcycle or whatever. Its breaking my heart that I relate more to the neighbor kid than my own son.So here I am feeling like a failure of a dad. I'm making the time to be with my kid, he has no interest in the activities I would like him to be involved in, and I have no interest in the activities he wants me to be involved in. Id play catch for hours if he wanted... but him asking me to play legos feels like a prison sentence that I cant get away from. My wife doesn't understand that I just can't deal with sitting down and coloring another harry potter picture. I'm an outdoor dad. I can take the kids swimming for hours and be happy. Ask me to make a bead necklace with them and I'd rather pull my hair out.People always give me the advice, "give it time" he will love those thing. Its complete bullshit. The neighbor kids and his friends are already invested heavily into sports and want to play. I see other kids begging their parents to take them to sporting events or play catch with them. I'm jealous of parents with these other kids. I'm broken hearted. I'm utterly disgusted with myself for not being able to relate to and engage with my child with what he likes to do. Its causing me severe anxiety and depression. How do I fix myself? How do I get over my own broken dreams of playing sports with my kid. To be clear I understand that this issue is 100% mine and that my child is great at being him and who he is. I feel like I have to a complete 180 degree turn in life right now to relate to my child and I am not sure I can do that. Help. via /r/Parenting http://bit.ly/2YIELFR
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