The scary thing here isn’t the Mikaela/parents story because it seems to be turning out so well.... but imagine the other dozens (or hundreds?) of families attempting to replicate this success without the talent, resources, and mental toughness to pull it off. I feel sorry for them.
So you have parents who think that their daughters are not progressing fast enough, not hitting the same milestones, and who can be a complete handful for coaches. "But her age, Mikaela was........" Guess what, your child is killing it. There is one MS. She doesn't live in your house.
It's happening. Now, in past and will happen in future. Only thing is, you will never hear about it. At least not about most of them, as in 99.9% cases these will fail, and this info never comes out to general public. Just as 99.9% of those (of us) who followed established trainer/athlete with no family involved route. There's only very very little number of kids in sport who turn out to be world champions on the end.
What I see as problem here is, parents get their idea about making world champion out of their kid.Then they push and basically destroy kid along the way. Same thing is with MS, with exception her parents were lucky and she's one of few kids that actually made it to top this way. But reality is, even if she is successful now, that her parents have fuc**ked up head. Since they never made anything on their own, they get idea to make it up for this with their kid, turning it into World champion. Yes, in Mikaela's case it was success. In pretty much every single other case I know it ended up with kid telling his/her parents to simply fu**ck off once they are old enough to dear to tell this to their parents. I still think for kids sport should be fun, and real training starts way later. This way, kids have their childhood, and once it's time to really start pushing, they are not already all feed up with this thing.
If you guys didn't treat the aristocracy like royalty then it wouldn't exist....
I have no problems with MS (or Lindsey, Ted, Marcel or any other top athlete) being treated well. She earned this respect with her own hard work. What I don't get is people treating real aristocracy that way. They did nothing to deserve this, except being born in "right" family. But that's whole different thing already, so let's not get into this