Welcome to another meeting of Overthinkers Anonymous. A forum in which we ponder every available facet of any topic imaginable, especially the ones which might, on the surface, seem blindingly straightforward but on further mulling, become interestingly fraught with decisional dilemmas. Favorite topics in the past have included: Fun…is it really? and Reading the Newspaper: Options to Consider.
Today’s topic is Kids and Sports: Good or Bad? As a mother who spends the bulk of every single evening driving her children to and from gymnasiums and swimming pools, I have invested considerable time thinking this one over.
On the surface, the answer is clear. Sports are of course, good. What parent wouldn’t want a healthy, physically active, athletic child? Most urban kids don’t have a lot of opportunities to run and jump and skip with the wild abandon that was the norm a generation ago, so for them, participation in organized sports is one way of ensuring their physical fitness. Proponents of these sports talk about the advantages of learning how to work as a team, the joy of camraderie, the benefits of meeting other like-minded athletes, the possibilities for travel, and the development of mental and physical discipline.
I see those potential benefits, but I also see potential costs.
Highly competitive individual sports require extreme dedication in terms of time spent practicing, and this of course, takes time away from other activities. Children who spend upwards of 18 hours per week in training are not usually children who have a lot of time for daydreaming. They live very structured lives, and by extension, so do their families. When is the time spent in practice enough? When is it too much? The further they go in the sport, the better they get, the higher the stakes and the more intense the pressure to put in a wee bit more time, squeeze in just a couple more hours, just to get this thing down, or that thing perfected, just until the very next meet, just to match the number of hours that the mythical “other” athletes are putting in. Take a personality that tends toward the obsessive and/or the perfectionistic, add intermittant positive reinforcement by way of occasional medals, and increase the challenge level by attainable increments: the result can be a single-minded young athlete, parents who get up at 5am every day of the week to drive to morning swim practice, and siblings who make do with leftover scraps of attention.
Team sports usually don’t take up quite as much time, unless of course you’re talking about hockey, which is a whole other story. I knew one family with 4 boys who all played hockey. They built an addition onto their house just for all of that smelly equipment. They also had an second fridge, just for milk, but now I’m losing track of the point. The point was that while team sports are not usually quite as time intensive as individual sports, they also have some serious downsides.
In a previous post about basketball, I scraped the surface of a concern that was niggling at me. My worry then was a little bit unformed, but something about these kids playing this sport organized by adults bothered me. Today I read an article called: The Morally Questionable Lessons of Formal Sports ( A New Look at the Classic Robber’s Cave Experiment) which gave voice to exactly what I was worried about.
The crux of the article is that organized team sports enforce a level of antagonistic competition that wouldn’t likely be part of play that kids would come up with spontaneously. That makes intuitive sense to me, based on my observations of the kind of play that goes on at recess time in the school yard.
In general, I have concerns about children’s time being overly structured, and participation in sports, individual or otherwise, definitely falls into the structured category.
So why do I continue to sign the kids up for those activities? Because they ask me to. Why do they ask me to? Because they were exposed to those activities, because they are good at them, because they derive satisfaction from participating. But do they like them because they are products of the culture that rewards those activities or would they naturally spend that many hours a week involved in those sports even without adult intervention? Hard to say. Would they be better or worse off if they didn’t participate? Who knows. All I know for sure is that Miss L has a completely different life now than she would have had if she hadn’t signed up for diving.
