re Organized Programs Worth the Effort?
As in the focus of a magnifying glass, play contains all developmental tendencies in a condensed form and is itself a major source of development … A child’s greatest achievements are possible in play, achievements that tomorrow will become her basic level of real action and morality.
—Lev Vygotsky, Psychologist (1980)
The perception is you train early and only do a single sport and do as much as you can until you’re better than everyone else. I think it’s pretty clear from the injury and performance-data side that that’s a terrible developmental model.
—Neeru Jayanthi, Medical Director, Primary Care Sports Medicine, Loyola University Health System (in Reddy, 2014).
Despite all the elite teams and high-powered youth leagues across the U.S., … statistics show that many children are dropping out of sports early—in droves—often because they can’t afford to play.
—Patti Neighmond, Reporter, National Public Radio (2015)
[Today’s youth sports] emphasize performance over participation well before kids’ bodies, minds, and interests mature. And we tend to value the child who can help win games or whose families can afford the rising fees. The risks for that child are overuse injuries, concussion, and burnout.
—Project Play Report (2015, p. 7; http://youthreport.projectplay.us/the-problem )
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Chapter Outline
Origin and Development of Organized Youth Sports Major Trends in Youth Sports Today Informal, Player-Controlled Sports: A Case of the Generation Gap Youth Sports Today: Assessing Our Efforts The Challenge of Improving Youth Sports Recommendations for Improving Youth Sports Summary: Are Organized Programs Worth the Effort?
Learning Objectives
· Explain how social changes related to family and childhood have influenced the growth of organized youth sports in the United States since 1950.
· Identify the sponsors of organized youth sports today, and explain why children’s sport experiences may vary depending on who sponsors their sport programs.
· Explain how the trend toward privatization in youth sports affects youth sport experiences.
· Define what is meant by the performance ethic, and explain why it has become especially important in private and elite youth sport training programs.
· Explain why parents today take youth sports so seriously.
· Explain why alternative sports have become increasingly popular with many young people today.
· Distinguish the differences between organized sports and informal games, and explain why informal games are played less today than in the past.
· Use the grades that experts have given to organized youth sports in the United States to identify the major problems in those programs.
· Identify recommendations that will increase the positive experiences of children in youth sports.
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According to Census Bureau estimates, there were about 50 million six- to eighteen-year-olds living in the United States in 2016. Widely cited estimates of youth sport participation range from 15 million to 46 million six- to eighteen-year-olds, depending on who does the counting and what counts as sports. But best as I can tell, during a given year, about 23 million U.S. children and youth participate in organized sports, including high school teams.1
When, how, why, and to what end children play these sports are the questions that concern parents, community leaders, and child advocates worldwide.
When sociologists study youth sports, they focus on the experiences of participants and how those experiences vary depending on the social and cultural contexts in which they occur. Research by sociologists has influenced how some people think about and organize youth sports, and it continues to provide valuable information that parents, coaches, and program administrators can use when organizing and evaluating youth programs.
This chapter summarizes part of that research as we discuss five topics that are central to understanding youth sports today. These are
1.
The origin and development of organized youth sports
2.
Major trends in youth sports
3.
Variations in the organization of youth sports and in the sport experiences of young people
4.
Youth sports and issues related to access, psychosocial development, and family dynamics
5.
Recommendations for improving youth sports
An underlying question that guides our discussion of these topics is this: Are organized youth sports worth the massive amount of time, money, and effort that people put into them? I continue to ask and help people answer this question as I talk with parents and work with coaches and others who are committed to organizing sports for young people.
ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF ORGANIZED YOUTH SPORTS
During the latter half of the nineteenth century, people in Europe and North America began to realize that child development was influenced by the social environment. This created a movement to organize children’s social worlds with the goal of building their character and turning them into hard-working, productive, and patriotic adults in rapidly expanding capitalist economies (Chudacoff, 2007).
It wasn’t long before organized sports for young boys were organized and sponsored by schools, communities, and church groups. The organizers hoped that sports, especially team sports, would teach boys from working-class families to obey rules and work together productively. They also hoped that sports would toughen middle- and upper-class boys and turn them into competitive men, despite the “feminized” values they learned from their stay-at-home mothers. At the same time, girls were provided activities that taught them to be good wives, mothers, and homemakers. The prevailing belief was that girls should learn domestic skills rather than sport skills when they went to schools and playgrounds. There were exceptions to these patterns, but after World War II, youth programs were organized this way in Western Europe and North America.
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The Postwar Baby Boom and the Growth of Youth Sports
The baby-boom generation was born between 1946 and 1964. Young married couples during these years were optimistic about the future and eager to become parents. As the first wave of baby boomers moved through childhood during the 1950s and 1960s, organized youth sports grew dramatically, especially in the United States. Programs were sponsored by public, private, and commercial organizations. Parents also entered the scene, believing that their sons’ characters would be built through organized competitive sports. Fathers became coaches, managers, and league administrators. Mothers did laundry and became chauffeurs and short-order cooks so their sons were ready for practices and games.
Most programs were for boys eight to fourteen-years-old, and they were organized with the belief that playing sports would prepare them to participate productively in a competitive economy. Until the 1970s, girls were largely ignored by these organizers and sat in the bleachers during their brothers’ games and, in the United States, given the hope of becoming high school cheerleaders. Then came the women’s movement, the fitness movement, and government legislation prohibiting sex discrimination in education, including school-sponsored sports. These changes stimulated the growth of sport programs for girls beginning in the mid-1970s. By the 1990s girls had nearly as many opportunities as boys.
Participation in organized youth sports is now a valued part of growing up in most wealthy nations. Parents and communities use their resources to sponsor, organize, and administer a variety of youth sports. However, some parents today question the benefits of programs in which winning is more important than overall child development; others seek out win-oriented programs, hoping their children will become the winners. A few parents encourage their children to engage in unstructured, noncompetitive physical activities—an alternative that many young people prefer over organized, adult-controlled sports.
For a century now, youth sport has been more proving ground than playground—an enterprise laced with purpose and emotion, even the hopes of a nation. —Tom Farrey, ESPN (in Game On, 2008, p. 99)
Social Change and the Growth of Organized Youth Sports
Since the 1950s, an increasing amount of children’s after-school time and physical activity has occurred in adult-controlled organized programs. This growth is partly related to changing ideas about family life and childhood in neoliberal societies, that is, societies where individualism and material success are highly valued and where publicly funded programs and services are being eliminated and selectively replaced by private programs. The following six changes are especially relevant to the growth and current status of organized youth sports.
First, the number of families with both parents working outside the home has increased dramatically. This has created a demand for organized and adult supervised after-school and summer programs. Organized sports have grown because many parents believe they offer their children opportunities to have fun, learn adult values, become physically fit, and acquire positive status among their peers.
Second, since the early 1980s, there’s been a major cultural shift in what it means to be a “good parent.” Good parents today are those who can account for the whereabouts and actions of their children 24/7—an expectation that leads many parents to seek organized, adult-supervised programs in which their children are monitored and controlled. Organized sports are also favored by parents because they provide predictable schedules, adult leadership for children, and measurable indicators of a child’s accomplishments. When children succeed, parents can claim that they are meeting cultural expectations. In fact, many Page 82mothers and fathers feel that their moral worth as parents is associated with the visible achievements of their children—a factor that further intensifies parental commitment to youth sports.
To meet cultural expectations for the “good parent,” mothers and fathers often are attracted to youth sport programs that use symbols of progressive achievement and skill development. Karate, with achievement levels signified by belt colors, is appealing to some because the visible and quantifiable achievements of their children can be used as proof of their parental moral worth. (Source: © Jay Coakley)
Third, many people today believe that informal, child-controlled activities inevitably lead to trouble—much like what occurs in the novel, Lord of the Flies. When young people are seen as threats to social order, organized sports are seen as ideal activities to keep them occupied, out of trouble, and under the control of adults.
Fourth, many parents, responding to fear-producing news stories about murders and child abductions now see the world outside the home as dangerous for their children. They regard organized sports as safe alternatives to informal activities that occur outside the home without adult supervision. Even when organized sports have high injury rates and uncertified coaches, parents still feel that organized programs are needed to protect their children.
Fifth, the visibility of high-performance and professional sports has increased awareness of organized competitive sports as a valued part of culture.As children watch sports on television, listen to parents and friends talk about sports, and hear about the wealth and fame of popular athletes, they often see organized youth sports, especially those modeled after professional sports, as attractive activities. And when children say they want to be gymnasts or basketball players, parents often try to nurture these dreams by seeking the best-organized programs in those sports. Therefore, organized youth sports have become popular partly because children see them as enjoyable and Page 83culturally valued activities that will enhance their status among peers and adults.
Sixth, the culture of childhood play has nearly disappeared in most segments of post-industrial society, especially in the United States. Children today have few opportunities to engage in spontaneous play—activities that involve creativity, expressiveness, joy, and “ownership” possessed by the participants themselves (Christakis and Christakis, 2010). Structured, achievement-oriented activities now begin early in children’s lives (Hyman, 2012). These activities, including organized sports for preschoolers, are controlled by adults and provide few opportunities for children to play, which often is seen as a “waste of time.” Instead, the focus is on improvement and measurable development that will pay off for a child in the future. Parents seek developmental activities that they hope will help their children experience academic and future occupational success.
Time for play has become a low priority in most families (Glenn et al., 2013; Singh and Gupta, 2012). Parents also restrict the spaces for play by keeping children in the house and yard, unless they live on a cul-de-sac where there is no traffic and where children know they are being watched by one neighbor or another (Hochschild, 2013). Even the language of play has nearly disappeared as children learn to describe and evaluate their experiences in instrumental terms rather than by using a vocabulary of emotions and expression—so they talk about activities in terms of what they have learned and accomplished rather than how they felt while they participated.
