1. Raise a kid who is an all around athlete not a single sport professional. That benefits only coaches trying to further their careers. Change sports every season for all around physical skill, and to allow growing bodies to avoid overuse syndromes and catastrophic injury as teens.
2. A wise orthopedic surgeon said "No one should do a single sport year-round until they are skeletally mature." When they are physically mature they can choose. Even so, watch out for overuse injuries and physical imbalances.
3. Think VERY carefully about contact sports. You only get one meniscus, and you only get one brain.
4. Consider letting your talented kid know early that no matter how far they go, they should plan for what comes when they give up their sport, and they need to be a complete person without it.
Great article, JVL, although I'm a bit puzzled as to why I find it so fascinating. I'm genetically predisposed to think the whole club sports thing is batshit crazy, considering I was so unathletic as to be one of the last kids picked for teams in gym class all through grade school. The embarrassment did push me toward academic achievement instead. But guess what? Somebody was always smarter or more accomplished in that arena too. If you base your self-worth on what you do, rather than who you are, in my case as a child of God, you are headed toward discontentment at best and pathology at worst. Case in point, TFG. I'm a parent, and thankfully my kids were more athletic than I, which placed them squarely at average ability. However, I believe them to be delightful people who are kind, decent, and hard-working. What do we really want our kids to be? If it's contentment you want for them then striving for status or stuff will prove to be an empty bag. Far better to focus on people and service.
Interesting what you said about your son at the age of 10. Recently my husband and I had the opportunity to talk to Wade Miley's parents (Wade pitches for the Brewers, and we were all in St Louis at the time for the Brewer series). Mr. Miley told us that when Wade was young and it was obvious he was beyond talented, they had to declare bankruptcy due to the costs of Wade's training, coaches, travel teams, tournaments, and whatever else it costs to have an elite 10-year-old. Pretty eye-opening.
Jonathan Last, you know I love this article; it touches on my experience as an XC coach and summarizes the essence of my book, Take Back the Game. The Cheetah's story makes me sad: not because she isn't wonderfully talented and gracious, but because she will likely get used up by the system. Coaches will feel pressure to keep up the intensity and her parents will have to actively resist the expectation that she should throw herself headfirst into running. In my experience, it's next to impossible to scale back and do less when you're killing it at 10, and it doesn't work out well for these rare talents. One of the advantages of running is that you don't need to specialize from a young age to compete in high school; newbies with natural talent, decent coaching, and a bit of drive will improve rapidly. It just isn't necessary, or even desirable (if you ask me) to have elementary school kids training at the track. The toothpaste is out of the tube, but parents can still exercise their judgment and resist the worst of it, for their kids' futures and for the sake of their family.
Great column, JVL. I’m so glad you made it available to everyone. My husband was a gifted athlete, but he set the tone in our family. Sports was supposed to be fun. And it was—and it stayed that way. Too bad when the parents get swept up in the hunt.
My roommate in medical school was a former elite level gymnast who trained with Bela Karoly in Houston. When she got too old for gymnastics she switched to diving and got a varsity scholarship to duke. She’s now a successful surgeon (though she broke her hand 4x diving). She was in swimming and gymnastics basically from the age of 3...when she got to med school the first year she said “I’m not going to work out this year.” Her first year off since age 3. After that year she said “I wonder how many v-ups I can do” and did about 70 in a row in the living room. Then she pulled the coffee table out of the way and did an aerial to see if she could still do it. She went back to recreational gym, but it’s really incredible the kind of talent and drive these excellent athletes have.
This is - as others have said - a really good piece. It resonates with me because, well, I ran cross country, ran at Footlocker in high school (twice) and ran to a scholarship at a college that shall not be named. I was on that elite track - almost to the exact description you provided.
But the truth was that I wasn't an elite athlete - and likely wasn't even close as a high-schooler (a knee injury ended competitive career in college). The divisional structure in high school gave me, and I still need to think about this more, a false sense of capability; I was great in my cohort, but middling when considering *all* high school runners in Michigan.
I suppose cross country was my first brush with genuine classism. For example, Div 1 kids had coaches and quality runners who could really push one-another; I was an outlier at my school, had time on my hands and a vague hope that running would get me into college. I would never stand a chance against an elite Div 1 high schooler likely because my ability to train well could not equal theirs (picture Rocky IV).
Need to think about it more but your piece reminded me of an excellent essay by the one and only David Foster Wallace. It's called String Theory, and it's a great meditation on what the difference is between genuine elite athletes and the merely talented: https://www.esquire.com/sports/a5151/the-string-theory-david-foster-wallace/
Need to think a bit more on post-college/athletic career - the pressure to perform and excel definitely has had a long lasting impact. Anyways, good piece. Looking forward to more.
Excellent piece. I think this really speaks to the cost of entry and privilege it takes to succeed at almost anything these days. There will be the the few, elite, hyper-productive, wealthy people and then everyone else. Elizabeth Warren and Dan Markovits have shown us the blueprint.
Congratulations for such a great discussion. Now that my kids have reached mid 20s, I feel for all the parents of young kids and the push to start earlier and earlier in the sport complex rat race. Our family situation (with our immediate families being several states and continents away) in so many ways was a curse for the dedication needed to join the race, and a blessing at the end of the day. Instead of specializing early, our kids did a sampler of activities (sports, music, choir, theater, pottery, arts, writing) and stayed at the recreational or less competitive traveling team possible, so we could take 2-week family vacations without being guilt-tripped by coaches / instructors. I have the best picture of one of my daughters at age nine, dress in her recreation level team soccer uniform while playing the viola, that was her, the Renaissance girl, interested in everything. When it got to the higher level and every organization required priority, we asked our kids to prioritize themselves. As a result, our 10th grade daughter dropped swimming (and it's daily practice until 11 pm), left the IB program and switched to the less insane mix of Honors and AP classes (with a request on our part to not take more than 2 AP classes at a time). Because of that, she was able to focus her attention on musical theater, acting, and skiing as a family, the activities that brought her the most joy. Our other daughter dropped sports at age 15th so she could spend a semester living with my sister's family abroad and going to a school housed in a 17th century monastery that literary looks like the Harry Potter school (secret passageways included). For the huge Harry Potter fan she was, that was better than any sport competition she could win (or more likely, lose). When she came back, she focused on her music and art at the level that she found more rewarding, playing and creating for herself. At some points in their young lives, we got a bit of pushback from them, because they saw everyone else doing what we told them not to do, but we asked them to trust us. Later, as adults they have told us thst they now see the virtues of our approach. They both were admitted to good colleges with some level of scholarships and are starting their independent lives with decent paying jobs in fields they like. Do they have perfect lives? Of course not. Do they struggle sometimes? Of course they do. Do we sometimes double-guess our choices as a family? Sure: in my case, if I had to do it again, I would dedicate even less time to the competitive sports scene, and more to do things as a family that brought us joy. I think whatever they could have learned from the supercompetitive sport circuit, they got it from the alternative non-competitive youth activities circuit. As a disclaimer, I rate myself as the least dedicated sport/activity parent on Earth. After getting stuck on the highway for 4 hours during the beginning of a snow storm on the way to pick up one of our daughters across town, I banned any activity or sport with practices farther than a 15 minute drive from home during normal weather. I was the parent secretly wishing that my youngest softball team would lose so we could finally go home. At the end of the day, what we still love doing as a family is going to musicals, traveling, hiking, skiing and cooking together, the rituals that we started by having more time to do together instead of driving around or waiting for high-stake sport/theater/arts/music/dance competitions. Finally, I felt some sort of validation to our approach when Sepp Kuss won the Vuelta a España this past September. If you want to read about a family that approached the "what brings you joy" to youth sports and whose son got to the maximum level you can easily find it by searching his name and Durango, Colorado.
This has a community cost, too. Parents have their kids so busy with one sport so early that there's no time for hanging out, no time for anything else. In our small town neighborhood, we have a sweet little park the residents maintain because our city doesn't have enough money to do so. Work days are fun and let us get to know each other. Families never participate in the park work days because their weekends are sports sports sports from preschool age. So our neighborhood has very little community unless you have similarly ages kids, and you're meeting at their structured sports events. Disclosure: My kids were not interested in sports thank god and were musicians, for the joy of it, not for the crazy kid music scene parents channel their non-athletic kids into. They're just like sports parents.
I'll put a plug in for CYO/school-type sports. We swim in the similar waters. Rec baseball finished up yesterday, XC has a couple more meets. We passed on soccer this fall after deciding not to have the 9 y/o start club and so played baseball instead. What we have found is that school sports (especially Catholic schools) get the balance closer between fun, competition, and learning. Part of the fun of playing sports is having rivals that you battle against through the years across different sports. The whole travel world turns the focus onto the individual rather than the team. I do think that one of the temptations that is real is that parents don't feel like they can help their kid even get to competency (which is my goal as a father) and so a camp here, a lesson there becomes a way to make up for a our deficiencies. Unfortunately, that places you before the yawning maw of over-professionalized youth sports. I will say that the arts is every bit as guilty of this move as sports but with even more expensive equipment and worse parents. I do think that for a lot of parents the choice is sometimes structured as sports/arts vs excessive screen time and in that equation all of the negatives of those over-developed cultures trump seeing your kid playing too much Madden or time on Youtube or whatever.
In her recent book "Doppelganger" Naomi Klein has some interesting perspective on the kids sports phenomenon. In her view, parents push kids into elite sports as another way to project the identity of the parents. Just as we create online identities that are, at least in part, idealized or even fictional versions of ourselves, by association with highly performing children we identify ourselves as people with exceptional parenting skills, genes or both. From personal experience I know this to be the case. My daughter was an excellent age group swimmer who hated the sport by the time she graduated from high school and quit college swimming after two years. There is no question that I played a role in this story and that my concern was at least as much for my own self-image as for hers.
Klein says that this need to continually enhance our personal identities drives a loss of perspective that is at least partially responsible for our badly fraying social fabric and our completely dysfunctional government. Too much focus on our own identities precludes effective group dynamics and concerted action.
The elite kids' sports world exists because there is a demand for it. Even if it is unhealthy, our market-based society will provide product to meet the demand. As a nation and a species, we are very good at providing ourselves with distractions and stimuli that satisfy our short term desires at the expense of our long term well being. Elite sports cannot be legislated away any more than can social media, cigarettes, alcohol, or junk food.
If people can see that plunging their talented children into this world is just another form of self-indulgence, just another rat race, and not really a pathway to optimizing the lives of our children, then maybe the trend can be reversed. But as with so many other features of our society, I am not hopeful.
I have zero interest in having my kids do elite sports although my 2nd grader is definitely the best on his soccer team. Still, I don't think it's accurate to say that this is simple self-indulgence. Part of the reason I want my kids to play sports is that it's healthy to be physically active and no one plays pick-up games any more. Part of the reason is that I played sports when I was a kid and I loved the experience. I want my children to experience that same love, but if they didn't like playing I wouldn't keep forcing them.
I know that there are ultra-competitive parents that are just trying to relive their own glory days, but I think most of these parents are doing it for their kids to have the experience. And the escalation means that even parents who aren't that competitive have to either join in or get left behind. I don't want to take my kid all across the state to play baseball tournaments, but I'm worried that he won't ever be able to make the varsity team in high school unless he plays tournament ball when he's younger. I worry that my desire not to have him play in elite sports is actually the selfish motive, prioritizing my time over his desire to compete.
Oye!!!!!!, JVL…. Had to look up “intentionality”… And in reading “Why kids run”…. I am reminded of “back in the day”…. My day, the 40’s and 50’s…. Being a parent is “a gift”…. And “wicked hawd”!!! Wicked hawd!!!!
Used to be…. Being a kid…. Was “being a kid”, variations, however…..
It's fascinating to observe that you, JvL, and most of the commenters here, appear to take for granted that every youngster should adopt a sport or sports as their most important extracurricular activity. The real cost of anything, of course, is the opportunity cost--what is given up that one could have done instead. And as a long-time teacher and sponsor of alternative activities (geography club, film club, history club, world affairs club, Model UN, Fridays for Future) I can tell you that what ends up getting deprived of oxygen is intellectual, social, civic and artistic pursuits. Quite simply, most young Americans have no time left in their day to develop these at all, or in any case, nearly as seriously as they do their sport, although of course some pretend to do so for college application purposes. Sports dominate students' lives and they dominate schools, which are locked into annual and daily schedules determined rigidly by the sports practice and competition schedules decided by their athletic conference organization. The "after-school clubs" that some of us remember from our adolescence must try to squeeze into hurried lunch periods, or weekend meetings--and predictably, they find it hard to develop substantive activities, and to compete with sports for adherents. It doesn't have to be this way, of course. Only in the US are sports a school activity (and in many communities, the main school activity that parents and students care about). In other countries, such as Germany, where we now live, young people develop their sports interests in a network of external sports clubs, and youths are much freer to define and develop their personal identities in many interesting ways.
Great point. I played high school sports and band and still had plenty of time for other clubs and nerdy pursuits, but I could certainly see how the elite sports escalation could suck up more time than that. Still, there's a limit to how many hours a week you can train the body without breaking it, leaving time for other things.
Music might be the only thing that's even within a quantum level of the same intensity as sports, for a few kids. One Seattle high school used to have an orchestra and jazz band that was taken as seriously as sports, by quite a few of the participants (e.g. high schooler with a $10,000 flute) but the district has largely dismantled advanced learning which also has degraded the feed of students into that program. Basically the opposite of what's happening in sports.
1) “native talent is both immediately obvious and utterly determinative” – Anyone who has ever played competitive sports (or really just playground sports) knows that this is true. There are always players who are simply faster or stronger or quicker. And for most of us, there really isn’t a thing that can be done about it. Hard work and attention to detail will only get you so far. Why do you think that the NFL combine measures things like how high someone can jump or their 40-yard dash time? Because the coaches know that if you are faster than the next guy, that’s not going to change as you progress in your career.
I used to play a lot of 2-man sand volleyball. One of the guys had a son who started playing with us when he barely knew what a volleyball looked like. After about a month, he could hold his own. Another month and he was the best player we had ever played with. Not long after that, he was playing in pro tournaments! So, yeah, natural ability is a pretty big determining factor when it comes to sports.
To be honest, I would think that XC is one of the most likely sports where natural athleticism would be the simple determinant. There’s no complicated skills to master (as in baseball or golf) nor are there many varying situations that must be faced during a game (like, say, playing QB and trying to figure out the best play to call). I’m not in any way questioning the dedication of XC athletes. I’ll bet that a lot of distance runners put more time in training than many other sports. But when you’re faster than the other folks, you’re going to win almost all of the time (see Bolt, Usain).
2) I hadn’t thought about the “two-income” household as an analogy to elite kids’ sports before, but I think it’s entirely apt. Once some folks realized that they could make money by offering to train kids (which would undeniably make them better than those not getting that training at least in the short term), the race was on. There were going to be stories of some kid making the pros after attending “that” camp or working with “that” coach, and most parents who could do it were willing to put up with the expense and time commitment either because their kids simply wanted to do it or because they believed there was chance that their kid could also “make it” (this includes the possibility of a college athletic scholarship). And it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. They basically didn’t have a choice.
And the idea of “what we should be doing is thinking about how to manage this system so that we maximize whatever benefits it creates and blunt whatever costs it imposes” is a wonderful sentiment, but I don’t see how to do that. And I just don’t see it as practical in today’s environment. There’s too much money to be made and too many kids who really like to play a particular sport (at least partly because they are good at it). If anything, the system is moving the other way. High school kids today routinely transfer schools to take advantage of better opportunities. And that includes transferring across the country.
Thank you so much, JVL. The way we have stripped away childhood from children, and the accompanying development (learning to negotiate through making up rules for nonsensical games, learning how to win and lose on your own, the sheer joy of playing) is such a negative in our culture. Adults need to get a life; hey, I know: how about volunteering or getting involved with a fath or civic group?
Advice from an MD with experience in this area
1. Raise a kid who is an all around athlete not a single sport professional. That benefits only coaches trying to further their careers. Change sports every season for all around physical skill, and to allow growing bodies to avoid overuse syndromes and catastrophic injury as teens.
2. A wise orthopedic surgeon said "No one should do a single sport year-round until they are skeletally mature." When they are physically mature they can choose. Even so, watch out for overuse injuries and physical imbalances.
3. Think VERY carefully about contact sports. You only get one meniscus, and you only get one brain.
4. Consider letting your talented kid know early that no matter how far they go, they should plan for what comes when they give up their sport, and they need to be a complete person without it.
Great article, JVL, although I'm a bit puzzled as to why I find it so fascinating. I'm genetically predisposed to think the whole club sports thing is batshit crazy, considering I was so unathletic as to be one of the last kids picked for teams in gym class all through grade school. The embarrassment did push me toward academic achievement instead. But guess what? Somebody was always smarter or more accomplished in that arena too. If you base your self-worth on what you do, rather than who you are, in my case as a child of God, you are headed toward discontentment at best and pathology at worst. Case in point, TFG. I'm a parent, and thankfully my kids were more athletic than I, which placed them squarely at average ability. However, I believe them to be delightful people who are kind, decent, and hard-working. What do we really want our kids to be? If it's contentment you want for them then striving for status or stuff will prove to be an empty bag. Far better to focus on people and service.
Interesting what you said about your son at the age of 10. Recently my husband and I had the opportunity to talk to Wade Miley's parents (Wade pitches for the Brewers, and we were all in St Louis at the time for the Brewer series). Mr. Miley told us that when Wade was young and it was obvious he was beyond talented, they had to declare bankruptcy due to the costs of Wade's training, coaches, travel teams, tournaments, and whatever else it costs to have an elite 10-year-old. Pretty eye-opening.
Jonathan Last, you know I love this article; it touches on my experience as an XC coach and summarizes the essence of my book, Take Back the Game. The Cheetah's story makes me sad: not because she isn't wonderfully talented and gracious, but because she will likely get used up by the system. Coaches will feel pressure to keep up the intensity and her parents will have to actively resist the expectation that she should throw herself headfirst into running. In my experience, it's next to impossible to scale back and do less when you're killing it at 10, and it doesn't work out well for these rare talents. One of the advantages of running is that you don't need to specialize from a young age to compete in high school; newbies with natural talent, decent coaching, and a bit of drive will improve rapidly. It just isn't necessary, or even desirable (if you ask me) to have elementary school kids training at the track. The toothpaste is out of the tube, but parents can still exercise their judgment and resist the worst of it, for their kids' futures and for the sake of their family.
Great column, JVL. I’m so glad you made it available to everyone. My husband was a gifted athlete, but he set the tone in our family. Sports was supposed to be fun. And it was—and it stayed that way. Too bad when the parents get swept up in the hunt.
My roommate in medical school was a former elite level gymnast who trained with Bela Karoly in Houston. When she got too old for gymnastics she switched to diving and got a varsity scholarship to duke. She’s now a successful surgeon (though she broke her hand 4x diving). She was in swimming and gymnastics basically from the age of 3...when she got to med school the first year she said “I’m not going to work out this year.” Her first year off since age 3. After that year she said “I wonder how many v-ups I can do” and did about 70 in a row in the living room. Then she pulled the coffee table out of the way and did an aerial to see if she could still do it. She went back to recreational gym, but it’s really incredible the kind of talent and drive these excellent athletes have.
JVL,
This is - as others have said - a really good piece. It resonates with me because, well, I ran cross country, ran at Footlocker in high school (twice) and ran to a scholarship at a college that shall not be named. I was on that elite track - almost to the exact description you provided.
But the truth was that I wasn't an elite athlete - and likely wasn't even close as a high-schooler (a knee injury ended competitive career in college). The divisional structure in high school gave me, and I still need to think about this more, a false sense of capability; I was great in my cohort, but middling when considering *all* high school runners in Michigan.
I suppose cross country was my first brush with genuine classism. For example, Div 1 kids had coaches and quality runners who could really push one-another; I was an outlier at my school, had time on my hands and a vague hope that running would get me into college. I would never stand a chance against an elite Div 1 high schooler likely because my ability to train well could not equal theirs (picture Rocky IV).
Need to think about it more but your piece reminded me of an excellent essay by the one and only David Foster Wallace. It's called String Theory, and it's a great meditation on what the difference is between genuine elite athletes and the merely talented: https://www.esquire.com/sports/a5151/the-string-theory-david-foster-wallace/
Need to think a bit more on post-college/athletic career - the pressure to perform and excel definitely has had a long lasting impact. Anyways, good piece. Looking forward to more.
Excellent piece. I think this really speaks to the cost of entry and privilege it takes to succeed at almost anything these days. There will be the the few, elite, hyper-productive, wealthy people and then everyone else. Elizabeth Warren and Dan Markovits have shown us the blueprint.
Congratulations for such a great discussion. Now that my kids have reached mid 20s, I feel for all the parents of young kids and the push to start earlier and earlier in the sport complex rat race. Our family situation (with our immediate families being several states and continents away) in so many ways was a curse for the dedication needed to join the race, and a blessing at the end of the day. Instead of specializing early, our kids did a sampler of activities (sports, music, choir, theater, pottery, arts, writing) and stayed at the recreational or less competitive traveling team possible, so we could take 2-week family vacations without being guilt-tripped by coaches / instructors. I have the best picture of one of my daughters at age nine, dress in her recreation level team soccer uniform while playing the viola, that was her, the Renaissance girl, interested in everything. When it got to the higher level and every organization required priority, we asked our kids to prioritize themselves. As a result, our 10th grade daughter dropped swimming (and it's daily practice until 11 pm), left the IB program and switched to the less insane mix of Honors and AP classes (with a request on our part to not take more than 2 AP classes at a time). Because of that, she was able to focus her attention on musical theater, acting, and skiing as a family, the activities that brought her the most joy. Our other daughter dropped sports at age 15th so she could spend a semester living with my sister's family abroad and going to a school housed in a 17th century monastery that literary looks like the Harry Potter school (secret passageways included). For the huge Harry Potter fan she was, that was better than any sport competition she could win (or more likely, lose). When she came back, she focused on her music and art at the level that she found more rewarding, playing and creating for herself. At some points in their young lives, we got a bit of pushback from them, because they saw everyone else doing what we told them not to do, but we asked them to trust us. Later, as adults they have told us thst they now see the virtues of our approach. They both were admitted to good colleges with some level of scholarships and are starting their independent lives with decent paying jobs in fields they like. Do they have perfect lives? Of course not. Do they struggle sometimes? Of course they do. Do we sometimes double-guess our choices as a family? Sure: in my case, if I had to do it again, I would dedicate even less time to the competitive sports scene, and more to do things as a family that brought us joy. I think whatever they could have learned from the supercompetitive sport circuit, they got it from the alternative non-competitive youth activities circuit. As a disclaimer, I rate myself as the least dedicated sport/activity parent on Earth. After getting stuck on the highway for 4 hours during the beginning of a snow storm on the way to pick up one of our daughters across town, I banned any activity or sport with practices farther than a 15 minute drive from home during normal weather. I was the parent secretly wishing that my youngest softball team would lose so we could finally go home. At the end of the day, what we still love doing as a family is going to musicals, traveling, hiking, skiing and cooking together, the rituals that we started by having more time to do together instead of driving around or waiting for high-stake sport/theater/arts/music/dance competitions. Finally, I felt some sort of validation to our approach when Sepp Kuss won the Vuelta a España this past September. If you want to read about a family that approached the "what brings you joy" to youth sports and whose son got to the maximum level you can easily find it by searching his name and Durango, Colorado.
This has a community cost, too. Parents have their kids so busy with one sport so early that there's no time for hanging out, no time for anything else. In our small town neighborhood, we have a sweet little park the residents maintain because our city doesn't have enough money to do so. Work days are fun and let us get to know each other. Families never participate in the park work days because their weekends are sports sports sports from preschool age. So our neighborhood has very little community unless you have similarly ages kids, and you're meeting at their structured sports events. Disclosure: My kids were not interested in sports thank god and were musicians, for the joy of it, not for the crazy kid music scene parents channel their non-athletic kids into. They're just like sports parents.
I'll put a plug in for CYO/school-type sports. We swim in the similar waters. Rec baseball finished up yesterday, XC has a couple more meets. We passed on soccer this fall after deciding not to have the 9 y/o start club and so played baseball instead. What we have found is that school sports (especially Catholic schools) get the balance closer between fun, competition, and learning. Part of the fun of playing sports is having rivals that you battle against through the years across different sports. The whole travel world turns the focus onto the individual rather than the team. I do think that one of the temptations that is real is that parents don't feel like they can help their kid even get to competency (which is my goal as a father) and so a camp here, a lesson there becomes a way to make up for a our deficiencies. Unfortunately, that places you before the yawning maw of over-professionalized youth sports. I will say that the arts is every bit as guilty of this move as sports but with even more expensive equipment and worse parents. I do think that for a lot of parents the choice is sometimes structured as sports/arts vs excessive screen time and in that equation all of the negatives of those over-developed cultures trump seeing your kid playing too much Madden or time on Youtube or whatever.
In her recent book "Doppelganger" Naomi Klein has some interesting perspective on the kids sports phenomenon. In her view, parents push kids into elite sports as another way to project the identity of the parents. Just as we create online identities that are, at least in part, idealized or even fictional versions of ourselves, by association with highly performing children we identify ourselves as people with exceptional parenting skills, genes or both. From personal experience I know this to be the case. My daughter was an excellent age group swimmer who hated the sport by the time she graduated from high school and quit college swimming after two years. There is no question that I played a role in this story and that my concern was at least as much for my own self-image as for hers.
Klein says that this need to continually enhance our personal identities drives a loss of perspective that is at least partially responsible for our badly fraying social fabric and our completely dysfunctional government. Too much focus on our own identities precludes effective group dynamics and concerted action.
The elite kids' sports world exists because there is a demand for it. Even if it is unhealthy, our market-based society will provide product to meet the demand. As a nation and a species, we are very good at providing ourselves with distractions and stimuli that satisfy our short term desires at the expense of our long term well being. Elite sports cannot be legislated away any more than can social media, cigarettes, alcohol, or junk food.
If people can see that plunging their talented children into this world is just another form of self-indulgence, just another rat race, and not really a pathway to optimizing the lives of our children, then maybe the trend can be reversed. But as with so many other features of our society, I am not hopeful.
I have zero interest in having my kids do elite sports although my 2nd grader is definitely the best on his soccer team. Still, I don't think it's accurate to say that this is simple self-indulgence. Part of the reason I want my kids to play sports is that it's healthy to be physically active and no one plays pick-up games any more. Part of the reason is that I played sports when I was a kid and I loved the experience. I want my children to experience that same love, but if they didn't like playing I wouldn't keep forcing them.
I know that there are ultra-competitive parents that are just trying to relive their own glory days, but I think most of these parents are doing it for their kids to have the experience. And the escalation means that even parents who aren't that competitive have to either join in or get left behind. I don't want to take my kid all across the state to play baseball tournaments, but I'm worried that he won't ever be able to make the varsity team in high school unless he plays tournament ball when he's younger. I worry that my desire not to have him play in elite sports is actually the selfish motive, prioritizing my time over his desire to compete.
Oye!!!!!!, JVL…. Had to look up “intentionality”… And in reading “Why kids run”…. I am reminded of “back in the day”…. My day, the 40’s and 50’s…. Being a parent is “a gift”…. And “wicked hawd”!!! Wicked hawd!!!!
Used to be…. Being a kid…. Was “being a kid”, variations, however…..
Well written and heart written…. Thank you….
It's fascinating to observe that you, JvL, and most of the commenters here, appear to take for granted that every youngster should adopt a sport or sports as their most important extracurricular activity. The real cost of anything, of course, is the opportunity cost--what is given up that one could have done instead. And as a long-time teacher and sponsor of alternative activities (geography club, film club, history club, world affairs club, Model UN, Fridays for Future) I can tell you that what ends up getting deprived of oxygen is intellectual, social, civic and artistic pursuits. Quite simply, most young Americans have no time left in their day to develop these at all, or in any case, nearly as seriously as they do their sport, although of course some pretend to do so for college application purposes. Sports dominate students' lives and they dominate schools, which are locked into annual and daily schedules determined rigidly by the sports practice and competition schedules decided by their athletic conference organization. The "after-school clubs" that some of us remember from our adolescence must try to squeeze into hurried lunch periods, or weekend meetings--and predictably, they find it hard to develop substantive activities, and to compete with sports for adherents. It doesn't have to be this way, of course. Only in the US are sports a school activity (and in many communities, the main school activity that parents and students care about). In other countries, such as Germany, where we now live, young people develop their sports interests in a network of external sports clubs, and youths are much freer to define and develop their personal identities in many interesting ways.
Great point. I played high school sports and band and still had plenty of time for other clubs and nerdy pursuits, but I could certainly see how the elite sports escalation could suck up more time than that. Still, there's a limit to how many hours a week you can train the body without breaking it, leaving time for other things.
Music might be the only thing that's even within a quantum level of the same intensity as sports, for a few kids. One Seattle high school used to have an orchestra and jazz band that was taken as seriously as sports, by quite a few of the participants (e.g. high schooler with a $10,000 flute) but the district has largely dismantled advanced learning which also has degraded the feed of students into that program. Basically the opposite of what's happening in sports.
Yeah, and every time they cut the budget music is the fist thing to go. While more and more money goes to sports.
A few comments…
1) “native talent is both immediately obvious and utterly determinative” – Anyone who has ever played competitive sports (or really just playground sports) knows that this is true. There are always players who are simply faster or stronger or quicker. And for most of us, there really isn’t a thing that can be done about it. Hard work and attention to detail will only get you so far. Why do you think that the NFL combine measures things like how high someone can jump or their 40-yard dash time? Because the coaches know that if you are faster than the next guy, that’s not going to change as you progress in your career.
I used to play a lot of 2-man sand volleyball. One of the guys had a son who started playing with us when he barely knew what a volleyball looked like. After about a month, he could hold his own. Another month and he was the best player we had ever played with. Not long after that, he was playing in pro tournaments! So, yeah, natural ability is a pretty big determining factor when it comes to sports.
To be honest, I would think that XC is one of the most likely sports where natural athleticism would be the simple determinant. There’s no complicated skills to master (as in baseball or golf) nor are there many varying situations that must be faced during a game (like, say, playing QB and trying to figure out the best play to call). I’m not in any way questioning the dedication of XC athletes. I’ll bet that a lot of distance runners put more time in training than many other sports. But when you’re faster than the other folks, you’re going to win almost all of the time (see Bolt, Usain).
2) I hadn’t thought about the “two-income” household as an analogy to elite kids’ sports before, but I think it’s entirely apt. Once some folks realized that they could make money by offering to train kids (which would undeniably make them better than those not getting that training at least in the short term), the race was on. There were going to be stories of some kid making the pros after attending “that” camp or working with “that” coach, and most parents who could do it were willing to put up with the expense and time commitment either because their kids simply wanted to do it or because they believed there was chance that their kid could also “make it” (this includes the possibility of a college athletic scholarship). And it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. They basically didn’t have a choice.
And the idea of “what we should be doing is thinking about how to manage this system so that we maximize whatever benefits it creates and blunt whatever costs it imposes” is a wonderful sentiment, but I don’t see how to do that. And I just don’t see it as practical in today’s environment. There’s too much money to be made and too many kids who really like to play a particular sport (at least partly because they are good at it). If anything, the system is moving the other way. High school kids today routinely transfer schools to take advantage of better opportunities. And that includes transferring across the country.
Thank you so much, JVL. The way we have stripped away childhood from children, and the accompanying development (learning to negotiate through making up rules for nonsensical games, learning how to win and lose on your own, the sheer joy of playing) is such a negative in our culture. Adults need to get a life; hey, I know: how about volunteering or getting involved with a fath or civic group?