Last July, a woman on a flight from Dallas to Charlotte bit a flight attendant, then tried to open a door to the plane while screaming. Crisis was averted when she was duct-taped to her seat. 

An excellent start! Now let’s get out the duct tape for sports parents, who need to sit down, shut up and remember that Pee Wee football is not the Super Bowl. In Mississippi this month, an umpire presiding over a ballgame played by 12-year-olds was punched in the face and given a black eye by a woman wearing a Mother of the Year shirt who had been thrown out of the stands for cursing. “It gets harder and harder to staff these tournaments because no one wants to listen to the verbal abuse and run the risk of what happened to me happening to them,” the umpire, Kristie More, told WLBT. 

Like other forms of bad behavior (deaths in car crashes are way up), hyper-reactive-sports-parenting seems to have spiked during the pandemic, when tempers have been running as hot as Bidenflation. Even before that, anyone who was thinking about helping out the kids by signing up to be an umpire or a referee would have been smart to buy a Kevlar jacket and make sure his insurance was paid up. “There has been a huge drop off in the number of available referees and officials in youth sports due to the obnoxious behavior of parents,” Rick Wolff host of WFAN radio’s “The Sports Edge” told The Washington Post in 2020. 

“Parents are ruining youth sports. And, even that assessment may be too rosy,” CNN’s Chris Cillizza says on his Medium page, noting that at the many sports events he attends as coach of his two sons’ basketball teams, one or more parents usually goes nuts by, for instance, yelling, “JUST CALL IT” at poor refs trying to keep a fifth-grade game square. 

Cillizza laments, “If the goal of parenting is to teach kids the right ways to conduct themselves in society when we are gone, then it’s clear — that at least in the arena of youth sports — we are failing them.” He calls for banning parents from watching. 

Nah. Far too extreme. Watching our kids have fun, especially as our own bones start to generate noise, is a special delight. Which is where my duct-tape solution comes in. Youth sports is a $17 billion industry, but duct tape is four bucks. My plan: across America, disinterested parties whose children are not participating will be enlisted as Duct Tape Enforcers imbued with the authority to shut up abusive, shouty Soccer Moms and Hockey Dads and adhesively affix them to their seats until the game is over. 

You’d only have to do this a few times, until a couple of videos go viral, before folks learn the basic rule that they should make only cheerful, encouraging noises as the wee ones are out there wriggling around on a field. Really, it doesn’t matter at all who’s best at sportsball anyway, does it? Your kid isn’t going to make it to the pros, and neither is the kid who just struck out your kid. The attics of America are filled with rusting little trophies so useless you couldn’t convince your heirs to pretend to be interested in them, let alone unload them at a yard sale. 

My volunteer duct-tape brigades would be much cheaper than alternatives such as hiring teams of hecklers to follow America’s sports parents around to treat them the way they treat junior-high-school referees (“Hey, Mel, you messed up that 1040 deduction for the SEP IRA, what are you, blind?!”).

The problem with sports parents is really just a symptom, though. The disease is how the culture is steadily abandoning all rules, restraints and standards. No, it’s not okay to wear your pajama bottoms in public, no you shouldn’t call your boss “Bro,” no you shouldn’t be singing along from your seat when you see “The Lion King” on Broadway. Respect, politeness, civility: if you can’t accept that there are standards for public behavior, stay home. From your couch, you can yell at the referees you see on TV all you want. 

Kyle Smith is critic-at-large for National Review.