I’ve certainly written about some sensitive topics in this space, talking about everything from one of the worst days of my marriage to psychedelics to gender grief in parenting. And yet, as I’ve thought about sharing my thoughts on youth sports culture, I’ve found myself surprisingly tongue-tied and hesitant.
As a starting point to actually writing about this topic, I’ve been trying to sort through that hesitancy. Some of it, I think, has to do with this weird dissonance I feel by being electively steeped in the very culture I want to critique. Maybe there’s no better vantage point to do so, but at the same time I notice how obnoxious I feel recording notes to myself about how infuriating it is to have an 8:00pm Sunday night soccer game while making the conscious choice to pack up my crew and drive to said soccer game.
I’m more aware than ever these days of not wanting to see myself as a victim to a culture I am co-creating. I’ve been working hard to stay above the line and figure out where my power lies, even – or especially – in the places I feel most stuck.
When it comes to kids’ sports and activities, I sense that I easily go below the line, even reveling a bit in my own frustration. It can feel almost good to be mad at the culture writ large when it comes to this stuff, or to let my irritation cycle among other parents, coaches, leagues, and capitalism. The adrenaline of cursing modern motherhood ironically, but undeniably, fuels all those hours spent sorting through calendars.
But I think there’s also another reason that I found myself feeling some sort of way about penning a critique, and it’s that the kids in my household are older now. They don’t have the patience (or interest, frankly) to read these essays, but still: I wouldn’t want my railing against the cultures of the things they love to be construed as not wanting to support their passions. Or worse yet, to think I’m calling them a burden.
And perhaps therein lies the crux of how we got into this mess in the first place. Parents – certainly including me – find ourselves in what feel like constant binds. We see our decisions about our kids’ activities as representative of our commitment to their passions, their joy, their development. We worry that critique or boundaries will constitute some kind of deprivation.
With minimal exception, we are a generation of parents indoctrinated to believe that our kids’ satisfaction and happiness must be our North Star. When I recently asked online for people to share their own reflections on youth sports culture, a woman named Lisa, not a parent herself, remarked, “I am shocked at the level of commitment involved… and just can’t figure out how/why they do it. My friends seem miserable. I have delicately asked why they do it and the response is that their kids love it… Hard to argue with – I guess?!”
And this might be it, boiled down right there. What our children love and think they want has primacy, not just over the fact that I myself might love lazy Saturday mornings, but sometimes also over other aspects of their wellbeing – ones that get easily obscured in the rush of packed schedules
The parents I know and love would never consciously set aside their kids’ wellbeing, and so there is of course something bigger at play here – forces that are driving us away from our deeper knowing. Forces that are draining our bank accounts, depriving us of sleep, driving up anxiety disorders, and deepening social inequities. The Youth Sports Industrial Complex has taken the field, and we might just be cheering along blindly on the sidelines.
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When a parent first signs their little one up to play a sport, the idea of that child becoming some kind of elite athlete is rarely on their mind. Most of us connect our kids to sports for a couple of reasons. First, many of us played sports ourselves growing up and look back fondly on those days. We remember how much fun it was to spend afternoons with our friends on the field or the court. It gave us something to do, a community to be part of, and maybe even a sense of pride. We of course want those things for our kids.
We also sign them up because we believe that playing team sports is inherently good for us. The idea that working hard and being on a team leads to better outcomes – like a love for movement and confidence and leadership skills – has become a well-accepted idea in our culture. We trust this to be true because many of us attribute our own character development to early experiences with sport, and because we hear so many other people say the same.
The vast majority of us get our kids on a team for all the right reasons, and we keep them playing for those same reasons. But what starts to happen in most communities these days is this slow but steady escalation. What started as a very casual Saturday morning commitment – an opportunity for our kids to be outside, burn some energy with peers – starts to evolve into something else.
A few of their friends have started playing for a club team, and they’re interested in maybe trying that too. We start hearing things like, “This is great for now, but if you really want their skills to develop, they should join this program over here.” We go to a meeting to learn about the club, and all of that instruction sounds like it could really be helpful. They seem to love this sport, after all. Why not give them a chance to really develop their potential?
Anyone with a kid in the club sports world knows well what happens next. Before we know it, practices are filling most nights of the week. Games twenty minutes away become forty and then an hour. Suddenly we’re driving two states over for a 9:00am game. Team fees are increasing each year. Oh, no, we don’t include a uniform in the club fee! That will be another $150. It happens both slowly and quickly, at a pace that’s just subtle enough to leave us sitting in a Holiday Inn on Mother’s Day weekend saying, “How did I let this happen?”
Some of us start to seriously question whether this is really what we want to be doing, but we go back to our belief that this is good for our kids – that this is all helping to build the character we want to see in them.
Which makes the reality of it all a little hard to digest. Because what the data shows is actually not nearly as clear as we have come to believe. A meta-analysis looking at over forty years of research of tens of thousands of youth, college, and even Olympic athletes showed that the connection between sport and character-building, particularly sportsmanship behaviors and moral reasoning, was simply not supported.
This flies so in the face of what our American traditions have told us that we naturally want to push back. But at the same time, most of us can recognize the truth in this science as well. Just like any activity or workplace or religion or culture – the value to us, the impact on who we become isn’t positive simply because we are in it. Our character develops as a result of the influences within that culture – the norms, the values, the people.
A great coach can absolutely inspire and develop qualities like commitment or empathy for teammates. A league culture built on shared outcomes can foster a sense of belonging. But independent of the relationships and the culture, simply playing sports themselves does little to help us.
Which is why the context in which the sports are happening matters so significantly, and why if we truly want our children to play sports to develop a love of movement, respect for others, leadership skills, and even a love of the game – then we should be paying very close attention to what is happening to youth sports in our current culture.
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What has been happening in the youth sports industry over the past couple of decades should make all of us at least a little wary. In her excellent book, Take Back the Game, journalist and sports parent Linda Flanagan traces the history of what she calls the “mania” that has taken over youth sports. That mania, of course, starts with money – specifically, the opportunity for organizations and venture capitalists to make lots of it.
Flanagan explains that starting in the 1980s and 1990s, schools and local communities had a hard time keeping up with the demand for youth sports. Title IX heralded a significant increase in girls’ participation, and meanwhile the competitiveness of the environment continued to grow. Even Disney’s building of the Wide World of Sports complex had an impact, fueling a growing and insatiable desire for more sports opportunities for kids. Private companies and investors came in to fill in the gaps and feed the hunger.
Within a decade or two, the youth sports world was suddenly full of club teams, elite training, fancy facilities, and a booming travel industry – plus all of the pricey equipment and apparel you can imagine. Fast forward to today, and parents are spending between 30 and 40 billion dollars per year on youth sports, according to the Aspen Institute.
The incredible part is that analysts believe that this is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s an iceberg that venture capital increasingly wants, with investors flooding the market to get their piece of the pie. Consider that over one billion dollars will be spent just on construction alone on renovated or new youth sports facilities this year.
Average parents, more concerned with how we’re going to be at three different fields at once than what VC company’s funds might be supplementing our kids’ coaches salaries, can easily miss how much this profit-driven model has changed the game.
For one, and perhaps most importantly, the shift has had a profound impact on social inequality in youth sports. With the current average cost of playing being well over $1000 per year per child for most sports – not including travel, and often much higher than that – huge swaths of families cannot afford to participate. Over half of families in youth sports say they struggle to afford the costs, and this disproportionately impacts BIPOC families and families from communities with lower levels of education. And even when lower-income families can make it work for their child to participate, the spending gap shows up again. Wealthier families end up spending four times as much on their children’s sports, meaning kids from lower-income households end up without the same level of training or travel opportunities. These discrepancies can then translate few potential opportunities for later scholarships, but also into the experience of continued marginalization.
The profit-driven system also impacts the youth sports experience in other ways, including in how competition-focused the culture becomes. With clubs vying for parents’ dollars, the focus on winning is incentivized. Even when parents say that they are looking for a program that is focused on development, they often fall prey to the allure of highly-winning teams.
While sports are inherently about competition, winning becoming too central to the experience ends up backfiring big. Sadly, 70% of kids drop out of sports by age 13, and when asked about it they talk about it simply not being fun anymore. When researcher Amanda Visik interviewed youth about what made sports fun for them, they pointed to being treated well by coaches, spending time with friends, and getting playing time. Winning was far down on the list. In fact, a study by the Josephean Institute found that 90% of children would rather play on a losing team than sit on the bench.
Dr. Andy Sweeney, a personal friend and a child and adolescent psychologist, ends up seeing a lot of youth athletes in his practice. He describes a generation of kids who are truly overwhelmed by the demands of their intensive schedules and the level of commitment expected of them. Some will acknowledge that it’s just too much, but many others might struggle to make the connection between the anxiety they feel and their athletics. They love the game, and so the idea of stepping away feels bad. But they’re also over the pressure.
What’s most challenging about this is that some parents, meanwhile, don’t realize the impact that the intensive sports culture is having. They see a kid who is passionate about their sport and they want to keep supporting them in doing the thing they love. And by this point, parents might also find themselves a little more emotionally invested than they should be. They don’t mean to, but given they’ve spent hundreds or likely thousands of hours at various fields by this point – giving up family dinners and vacations and sleep – it’s hard not to have an attachment to what happens next. Some parents, particularly if their kid has gotten pretty good at their game, start to hope that this might turn into college opportunities.
The reality, though, is that only 2% of high school athletes are awarded athletic scholarships for college. That number is staggeringly low, only made more stark by the fact that only 1% of college athletes will get a full scholarship. Given the statistics, it feels downright exploitative to me that so many youth sports programs will talk about – implicitly or explicitly – the idea of scholarship potential to families as a way to keep them engaged in higher-level training.
Dr. Sweeney told me, “If you ask some of these kids if they want to play in college, some will say yes, but a lot will say they are not sure. And once those kids decide they want to be playing at the highest level, it becomes part of their identity and it’s devastating if something happens.” The data show that many college athletes stop playing long before graduation, whether due to burnout, academic stress, or injury.
For those earlier on in the youth sports journey, thinking about college or scholarships may not be on the radar yet at all. And perhaps your kids are still happy as larks going from game to game on the weekends, no anxiety issues in sight. What I think is important here, however, is how quickly and intensely these dynamics start to come at you when you get involved in the system. I know countless parents who look back and wonder, “How did we get here?”
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But truly, how did we get here? The economics certainly tell one important part of the story, but we’d be naive to think those investors weren’t capitalizing on a wider cultural context. That context, I believe, has to do with what recent generations of parents were taught about what it means to raise good kids.
First and foremost, we were taught that our core task was to make our kids happy. It seemed a simple enough mandate at first, until the first tantrum or major disappointment indicated to us that we were apparently totally failing at our most important job. We were taught too that being a good parent meant making sure we optimized our kids’ childhoods, not letting them miss out. Heaven forbid they show an aptitude for something and we not cultivate it. We indeed saw our roles as cultivators, ensuring that we provided the opportunities and resources needed to maximize their experiences of childhood.
Fortunately, the culture around parenting is shifting as we speak, and I think many of us don’t buy into those ideas as fully anymore – at least not consciously. But I think for a good portion of us, a lot of these beliefs got pretty lodged in our parenting psyches and are hard to break out of. We might ‘know’ that we don’t need to say yes every time the coach adds on an extra practice, but we look at our kid who doesn’t want to be the one player to miss and potentially get grief, and we grab our keys.
I hear it all the time: parents telling me they want to reclaim their sense of agency when it comes to this stuff, but then guilt taking hold. The bottom line is that it’s indeed not easy, because grounded parenting in today’s youth sports culture often feels like swimming against the current. And what I like to remind us all too is that guilt is not often a good barometer when it comes to parenting (or most things really). Guilt is often a sign we are stepping out of our social conditioning or trying something unfamiliar, not in fact doing something against our values.
When I asked other parents to tell me what’s helped them to stop the madness and try to reclaim sports, I heard a lot about being selective with the programs they joined and being willing to set boundaries wherever needed. They also talked about keeping their own emotions – including excitement – in check when it comes to their kids’ involvement. Some parents mentioned too remembering that they themselves don’t need to be at every game, advice that I’ve heard echoed by psychologists and coaches.
What is clear is that it’s of course not sports themselves that are a problem. There remains a really amazing opportunity for developing both strength and character through the experience of athletics, as long as the culture and coaching are aligned with a family-first model. A family-first model asks questions like:
- How is this activity impacting our family as a whole?
- What costs are we paying for this experience – considering money, energy, time, rest, stress, and any others?
- How will we respond if my child gets injured, loses interest, or has a negative experience?
- What feelings or identities are getting wrapped up in this experience? What do we think about that?
- What might I need to do or change to ensure this experience aligns with our family values?
At the end of the day, what I hear and what I feel is that there is a chance to take back the game, but only if we as the parents are willing to challenge what’s become the status quo – to say no to the mania that has resulted in the Youth Sports Industrial Complex. A friend said it best in her message to me: “There are many times where I’m like “we’re the adults. We could collectively decide not to do this.”