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Kids and Sports: The New Youth Athletics Landscape

Kids and Sports: The New Youth Athletics Landscape

little-bmxers
little-bmxers

Over the last twenty years, the landscape of youth sports has changed dramatically. It used to be that children would gather after school and choose (or invent) an activity or game to play until dinnertime. In this world of “free play,” the kids set the rules and managed themselves more or less independently. These days, though, it’s much more common for kids’ sports to be highly organized and stratified, with adults more heavily involved than they were even a generation ago.

The downsides of adult-led, year-round structure

Kids can sometimes be rough-and-tumble, and they can also be cruel. This means that free play can have its share of problems when seen through the eyes of adults who are most concerned about limiting safety and social risks. From their point of view, there are clear advantages to having a neutral adult coach providing instruction and “managing” play. Parents who view free play as an unstructured waste of time may also be drawn to what they see as the more targeted developmental benefits of organized sports, though for slightly different reasons.

It’s important to understand that this shift has come with a cost. Many child development experts now believe that adult-led, year-round structure has deprived children of important opportunities to practice innovation, independence and self-management—including social skills like cooperation and dispute resolution. They also believe it has deprived them of opportunities to learn where the boundary is between good-natured (even competitive) physical play and play that is rough enough to cause real harm. Learning where this boundary is requires live experimentation that entails some risk. This is how children learn how to read and respond to others and to different kinds of situations appropriately.

The up-or-out world of youth athletics

The shift to adult-led, year-round structure has also changed the nature of youth athletics, creating a two-tier system of “recreational” and “competitive” sports where recreation often gets short shrift. This can produce a high-pressure environment for many children, who automatically begin associating athletics with expectations of performance. This sort of environment has the potential to change the relationship between kids and sports in a few different ways. In some cases, it may encourage youngsters of 8 or 9 years (or their parents) to choose a single sport early in their “careers” and to commit to it for the entire year. Children who do not make this early all-or-nothing commitment (even very athletic ones) may find that their playing opportunities dwindle and that they’re stuck in the middle—somewhere between a competitive tier that may demand too much and a recreational one that may offer too little. In other cases, it may discourage children with less obvious talent or less drive to abandon sports altogether.

The impact on health and wellness

This isn’t about nostalgia. It’s about long-term musculoskeletal health and fitness. For earlier generations, sports were more seasonal and it was common for kids to play several different sports throughout the year. Since they didn’t specialize until later (if at all), they tended to become more well-rounded athletes and their physical development tended to be more balanced. And to the extent that different sports require different types of movement and emphasize different muscle groups, it was less likely for a young athlete to suffer overuse injuries. Today, physicians say they are seeing more juvenile athletes come in with repetitive stress injuries. For example, a recent study from the journal Radiology revealed that young baseball pitchers are at risk of an overuse injury of the shoulder known as acromial apophysiolysis, which can lead to long-term and even irreversible consequences as kids grow.

And what about children who opt-out of sports early because of performance pressure or burnout, or because they can’t “keep up” with peers who are developing before them? It may take these children years to rediscover sports. And they may miss out on exactly the types of physical activity that keep them fit and healthy unless they find some other alternatives.

A healthier, more balanced approach to athletics

Most medical doctors and chiropractic physicians would probably agree about the importance of variety when it comes to children’s musculoskeletal health and development. Even more broadly, variety is the key to achieving balanced physical, social and psychological growth. Plus, varying your activities is a great way to prevent boredom and increase enjoyment. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with competition or with working hard to excel at something, especially when it comes to sports and if it’s done for the love of the game. However, we adults should remember to let kids be kids, which means trying out different athletic activities, succeeding at some and failing at others, and learning to enjoy the process every step of the way.

Structured Versus Unstructured Play: What’s the Difference, and Does it Matter?

Structured Versus Unstructured Play: What’s the Difference, and Does it Matter?

lined up on line of scrimmageWe’ve all heard about parents like this. They have every moment of their child’s day scheduled with some activity or another. First it’s soccer, then off to violin lessons, after which they meet up with their scouting group. With the increase in urbanization and concerns for child safety, it’s becoming more and more unusual to see children just out playing in the street or in a neighbor’s back yard. Many parents have embraced the idea of “structured play” because they believe it helps their children develop specific skills they will need to succeed in the world. It also allows parents more predictability and control over their own schedules. On the other hand, many of these same parents view unstructured play (which many grew up with themselves) as a waste of time that could be better used for managed activities. But studies have shown that there are very real advantages to unstructured play, and that the skills it develops are just as important as the ones that can be taught in structured environments.

Structured play consists of activities with externally-imposed organization that generally involve rules and an objective of some sort. Things such as video games, team sports, board games and building model airplanes, for example, are all structured activities. At the other end of the spectrum are unstructured activities like inventing and running games, building with blocks, having a catch, writing a play, looking for bugs in the woods, and drawing and painting. These activities are self-organizing and open-ended. Many times, they have no particular goal. In unstructured play, children make up their own rules as they go along and establish their own limits.

Nearly every modern parent has heard his or her child whine or moan the dreaded words “I’m bored.”  By most accounts, the “I’m bored” syndrome has actually become more common as the nature of play has shifted and parental engagement has changed. Sometime around the mid-20th century, children’s play began to be centered on the toy rather than on the activity. And as today’s “interactive” toys have evolved to actually direct and drive the activity (think about Wii, PlayStations, iPads, etc.), children themselves have become more passive in the process. The result is that many of them are less able to entertain themselves through their own creativity.  This inability becomes very apparent whenever the novelty of a new game wears out and the kids reach out to their parents to provide the same level of structure and ongoing entertainment that the game had been providing.  This places growing demands on parents, who may then begin to look for other outside sources of focused, constructive stimulation.  Of course, the problem with this type of response is that it simply substitutes one form of externally-driven activity for another. What happens to a child who never learns to direct his or her own energy or to organize his or her own activity? There is a very good chance that the child who never learns to do these things will be unable to do them well as an adult.

A 2005 study published in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine found that children’s unstructured play time had dropped by 25% between 1981 and 1997. This is a worrisome trend since unstructured play is necessary in order for children to improve social skills, develop healthy coping mechanisms for stress and boost cognitive skills, especially those involved in problem solving. Through unstructured play, children enhance their own creativity, become more self-confident and learn to empathize with others. It develops neural areas in the brain that are concerned with emotional reactions and social understanding.

There is no doubt that structured play is important in teaching multitasking, developing specialized skills and exposing children to a wide range of ideas and experiences. Just be sure that your children are given equal amounts of unstructured time in which to explore their own interests, develop their creativity, solve problems and work on their interpersonal skills.