I’m very active in sports and would love for my three kids
to follow in my footsteps. And while I’ve introduced by five year old and three
year old to sports (Soccer and Judo, it has been more in an effort to start developing
basic motor skills rather than for the “competition.” but let’s be real… how
competitive can (or should) three and five year soccer be? As parent’s I think we sometimes lose focus
of the real goal – sports/athletics should be fun for our kids.
There are an estimated 41 million American kids playing competitive youth
sports. The number of children involved in youth sports has risen significantly
over the last 10 to 20 years, according to Dr. Steve Carney, a professor of
sport management at Drexel University in Philadelphia.
"In just about every sport, there's been an increase" he says.
In soccer, which remains one of the country's most popular youth sports,
numbers have risen from about 15 million in 1987 to more than 17.5 million in 2002,
the latest date for which numbers are available, according to U.S. Soccer.
In Pop Warner Football, participation has nearly doubled in the last 15
years, from about 130,000 players to 260,000 players, according to the
organization. The cheerleaders, who have competitions of their own, are now
140,000 strong.
Even off-beat sports like skateboarding, mountain biking and snowboarding,
in which kids participate rather than compete, have grown substantially, Carney
says.
Curiously, the one sport that has seen a decline is Little League Baseball, America's
pastime. There has been a 1 percent decrease in enrollment every year since its
peak in 1996. The organization attributed the decline to the myriad other
options available to kids. That said, there are still more than 2.2 million
kids lining up at home plate each year.
Much of the growing enthusiasm for youth sports has come from the changing
way in which children play, experts say.
"You don't dare say to your child at age 8 or 10, 'Just go out and play
and I'll just see you at dinnertime,' " says Jon Butler, executive
director of Pop Warner. As unstructured play has gone by the wayside,
competitive league sports have filled the vacuum.
But what kind of effect has it had on kids? For the most part, a good one,
experts say.
Kids learn how to be physically active -- no small feat at a time when
childhood diabetes is soaring and 16 percent of American kids are considered
obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention -- as well
as how to work within a team and take pride in their skills.
But there's a downside as well. "We're seeing a lot of what we call
'professionalization' of children's sports," says Dr. Dan Gould, the
director of the Michigan State University Institute for the Study of Youth
Sport. "We see a lot of kids, even young kids, doing it just for the
scholarship now."
One of the biggest concerns in youth sports, Gould says, is parents who push
their kids into "premature specialization," where kids focus all
their skills on one sport and endure year-round training. It can lead not only
to burnout, but also to sports injuries.
"There's pretty good research out there that says that you need about
10 years and 10,000 hours of practice to become really expert at a sport,"
says Gould. "The trouble is, parents hear these kinds of things, and they
try to get it all in the first two years."
The costs to family life can be considerable, too. Just ask Bill Dunbar, a
father of three in Seattle.
His children, ages 5 to 11, play Little League, soccer, basketball, tennis, and
gymnastics. "It's crazy," he says. "We live very close to all of
our playing fields, but it is still just out of control."
There are, of course, plenty of sports in which kids are still just having
fun. Take lacrosse, one of the fastest growing sports, for example, which has
gone from 82,000 youth players in 2001 to 204,000 in 2005, according to Brian
Logue, spokesman for U.S. Lacrosse.
Part of its appeal, Logue says, is that not only is it a very active sport,
but its rules also are still a little unfamiliar to parents, which means, that,
unlike Little League, there are no "Little League Parents."
"The players' parents don't have any idea what the rules are or what
the expectations should be," Logue says, "so the kids just go out
there and have fun."
Jason
