emotional 9 year old boy

[dlab]

My son has always been slightly "high maintence". He was very ill as a baby and maybe we let his emotions rule us as he became older. He is now a healthy 9 year old who has a family that loves him unconditionally and is always supportive. He is intelligent, funny and in general a great kid. He has no issues with school and all the teachers love him. He tends to be very careful when showing his emotions to people. The issue we are having is that he hates to take the time to learn something new. He would rather guess at an answer then spend the time to actually learn the material. He has recently started on a new much more competitve soccer team. He is a great player, and when the coach nicely asks him to do something differn't he takes it as if the coach is yelling at him and telling him he is a bad soccer player. He has now been playing in the league for one month and continually puts himself down, even though the coach is always being supportive, and telling him he is a great player.  My husband and I are very supportive of him and we always praise him on the things that he is doing well. He just concentrates on the negative. I don't know what to do now. I'm a little concerned that we are allowing the behavior to continue because we spend so much time discussing problems with him. I would greatly appreciate any advice that you could give us.  

[margypops]

Ignore it, simply dont feed into it, possibly it gets him more attention, when he sayss negative things about himself, let him ,maybe he is getting too much talk from differant quarters, so dont respond to the statements he makes.