By Caroline Anderson
When former Dodgers player Eric Karros would be under pressure on the field, he’d sing “Your Song” by Elton John to himself.
Karros, a Manhattan Beach resident and father, shared this tidbit with the audience of students and parents at the MBX symposium, “Finding the Balance,” at Mira Costa High School Thursday night.
Karros, his adult daughter Mikah Maly-Karros, former Mustang Dr. Jake Insler and Dr. Steve Gautreau discussed how parents could help their children cope with the stress of school and other demands.
A mother had asked what her son, a baseball player, could do when expectations were running high.
Insler, a sports psychologist, said the technique mentioned by Karros was known among psychologists as “recentering.”
Maly-Karros and her father discussed how despite being a CIF basketball champion with straight As when she attended Mira Costa from 2004 to 2008, she struggled.
“I looked like I had it all from the outside,” said Maly-Karros, who has a master’s in clinical psychology and is a marriage and family therapist intern. “I lived in a big, fancy house. I got a brand new BMW for my first car. I could go shopping whenever I wanted. People thought it was pretty cool that my dad played for the Dodgers. But on the inside, I was completely empty, lonely. I felt isolated, lost, hollow.”
Maly-Karros abused drugs and alcohol, to the point that her mother would make her take a Breathalyzer test when she came home and her parents installed a feature in her car that allowed them to cut the ignition from a computer.
“Although I hated them at the time, now I’m thankful that they were so vigilant,” said Maly-Karros. “I never got to the point where I caused irreparable damage to my life.”
After going to a psychiatrist, she was diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed Adderall, which she said became her “next addiction.”
“I got to the point where I couldn’t get out of bed without Adderall,” she said.
She smoked marijuana to help her fall asleep at night. She called the combination a “terrible cycle.”
“I was completely dependent on substances for emotional balance,” she said.
Since then, Maly-Karros has found that connecting with other people was “the most important thing.”
“People often don’t take time to understand teens,” she said. “They’re often dismissed as hormonal.”
Karros said he wished he’d tried to connect more with his daughter when she was growing up.
“Looking back on me as a parent, I was not as balanced as I should’ve been,” he said. “I was at every game watching her play, but I probably should’ve spent more time getting to know her.”
Karros also suggested that kids find a healthy creative or physical outlet. For him in high school, he said, it was hitting baseballs. As a professional athlete, it was playing basketball. He had teammates who wrote poetry, took photographs and played the guitar, he said.
He called these activities internal motivation, which he contrasted with the external motivation of winning awards and the approval of others.
“Internal motivation is doing a thing because you want to do it, not because your parents want you to do it,” he said.
He taught his two sons, who are an eighth grader at Manhattan Beach Middle School and freshman at Mira Costa, to play baseball, he said, but they also enjoy things he “never in a million years would have thought they’d be interested in.”
Karros said that parents have to help their kids find balance.
“This whole balance thing is a two-way street,” he said. “It also comes from the parent. Balance your desires and expectations with who they are inside. We need to deal with the kid in front of us, not the kid in our fantasies.”
