The author identifies a number of factors that make the future of the high school and college sports uncertain. Which two fac

Are Organized Programs Worth the Effort?

As in the focus of a magnifying glass, play contains all developmental tendencies in a condensed form and is itself a major source of development … A child’s greatest achievements are possible in play, achievements that tomorrow will become her basic level of real action and morality. 

—Lev Vygotsky, Psychologist (1980)

The perception is you train early and only do a single sport and do as much as you can until you’re better than everyone else. I think it’s pretty clear from the injury and performance-data side that that’s a terrible developmental model. 

—Neeru Jayanthi, Medical Director, Primary Care Sports Medicine, Loyola University Health System (in Reddy, 2014).

Despite all the elite teams and high-powered youth leagues across the U.S., … statistics show that many children are dropping out of sports early—in droves—often because they can’t afford to play.

—Patti Neighmond, Reporter, National Public Radio (2015)

[Today’s youth sports] emphasize performance over participation well before kids’ bodies, minds, and interests mature. And we tend to value the child who can help win games or whose families can afford the rising fees. The risks for that child are overuse injuries, concussion, and burnout. 

—Project Play Report (2015, p. 7;  http://youthreport.projectplay.us/the-problem )

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Chapter Outline

Origin and Development of Organized Youth Sports Major Trends in Youth Sports Today Informal, Player-Controlled Sports: A Case of the Generation Gap Youth Sports Today: Assessing Our Efforts The Challenge of Improving Youth Sports Recommendations for Improving Youth Sports Summary: Are Organized Programs Worth the Effort?

Learning Objectives

· Explain how social changes related to family and childhood have influenced the growth of organized youth sports in the United States since 1950.

· Identify the sponsors of organized youth sports today, and explain why children’s sport experiences may vary depending on who sponsors their sport programs.

· Explain how the trend toward privatization in youth sports affects youth sport experiences.

· Define what is meant by the performance ethic, and explain why it has become especially important in private and elite youth sport training programs.

· Explain why parents today take youth sports so seriously.

· Explain why alternative sports have become increasingly popular with many young people today.

· Distinguish the differences between organized sports and informal games, and explain why informal games are played less today than in the past.

· Use the grades that experts have given to organized youth sports in the United States to identify the major problems in those programs.

· Identify recommendations that will increase the positive experiences of children in youth sports.

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According to Census Bureau estimates, there were about 50 million six- to eighteen-year-olds living in the United States in 2016. Widely cited estimates of youth sport participation range from 15 million to 46 million six- to eighteen-year-olds, depending on who does the counting and what counts as sports. But best as I can tell, during a given year, about 23 million U.S. children and youth participate in organized sports, including high school teams.1

When, how, why, and to what end children play these sports are the questions that concern parents, community leaders, and child advocates worldwide.

When sociologists study youth sports, they focus on the experiences of participants and how those experiences vary depending on the social and cultural contexts in which they occur. Research by sociologists has influenced how some people think about and organize youth sports, and it continues to provide valuable information that parents, coaches, and program administrators can use when organizing and evaluating youth programs.

This chapter summarizes part of that research as we discuss five topics that are central to understanding youth sports today. These are

1.

The origin and development of organized youth sports

2.

Major trends in youth sports

3.

Variations in the organization of youth sports and in the sport experiences of young people

4.

Youth sports and issues related to access, psychosocial development, and family dynamics

5.

Recommendations for improving youth sports

An underlying question that guides our discussion of these topics is this: Are organized youth sports worth the massive amount of time, money, and effort that people put into them? I continue to ask and help people answer this question as I talk with parents and work with coaches and others who are committed to organizing sports for young people.

ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF ORGANIZED YOUTH SPORTS

During the latter half of the nineteenth century, people in Europe and North America began to realize that child development was influenced by the social environment. This created a movement to organize children’s social worlds with the goal of building their character and turning them into hard-working, productive, and patriotic adults in rapidly expanding capitalist economies (Chudacoff, 2007).

It wasn’t long before organized sports for young boys were organized and sponsored by schools, communities, and church groups. The organizers hoped that sports, especially team sports, would teach boys from working-class families to obey rules and work together productively. They also hoped that sports would toughen middle- and upper-class boys and turn them into competitive men, despite the “feminized” values they learned from their stay-at-home mothers. At the same time, girls were provided activities that taught them to be good wives, mothers, and homemakers. The prevailing belief was that girls should learn domestic skills rather than sport skills when they went to schools and playgrounds. There were exceptions to these patterns, but after World War II, youth programs were organized this way in Western Europe and North America.

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The Postwar Baby Boom and the Growth of Youth Sports

The baby-boom generation was born between 1946 and 1964. Young married couples during these years were optimistic about the future and eager to become parents. As the first wave of baby boomers moved through childhood during the 1950s and 1960s, organized youth sports grew dramatically, especially in the United States. Programs were sponsored by public, private, and commercial organizations. Parents also entered the scene, believing that their sons’ characters would be built through organized competitive sports. Fathers became coaches, managers, and league administrators. Mothers did laundry and became chauffeurs and short-order cooks so their sons were ready for practices and games.

Most programs were for boys eight to fourteen-years-old, and they were organized with the belief that playing sports would prepare them to participate productively in a competitive economy. Until the 1970s, girls were largely ignored by these organizers and sat in the bleachers during their brothers’ games and, in the United States, given the hope of becoming high school cheerleaders. Then came the women’s movement, the fitness movement, and government legislation prohibiting sex discrimination in education, including school-sponsored sports. These changes stimulated the growth of sport programs for girls beginning in the mid-1970s. By the 1990s girls had nearly as many opportunities as boys.

Participation in organized youth sports is now a valued part of growing up in most wealthy nations. Parents and communities use their resources to sponsor, organize, and administer a variety of youth sports. However, some parents today question the benefits of programs in which winning is more important than overall child development; others seek out win-oriented programs, hoping their children will become the winners. A few parents encourage their children to engage in unstructured, noncompetitive physical activities—an alternative that many young people prefer over organized, adult-controlled sports.

For a century now, youth sport has been more proving ground than playground—an enterprise laced with purpose and emotion, even the hopes of a nation. —Tom Farrey, ESPN (in Game On, 2008, p. 99)

Social Change and the Growth of Organized Youth Sports

Since the 1950s, an increasing amount of children’s after-school time and physical activity has occurred in adult-controlled organized programs. This growth is partly related to changing ideas about family life and childhood in neoliberal societies, that is, societies where individualism and material success are highly valued and where publicly funded programs and services are being eliminated and selectively replaced by private programs. The following six changes are especially relevant to the growth and current status of organized youth sports.

First, the number of families with both parents working outside the home has increased dramatically. This has created a demand for organized and adult supervised after-school and summer programs. Organized sports have grown because many parents believe they offer their children opportunities to have fun, learn adult values, become physically fit, and acquire positive status among their peers.

Second, since the early 1980s, there’s been a major cultural shift in what it means to be a “good parent.” Good parents today are those who can account for the whereabouts and actions of their children 24/7—an expectation that leads many parents to seek organized, adult-supervised programs in which their children are monitored and controlled. Organized sports are also favored by parents because they provide predictable schedules, adult leadership for children, and measurable indicators of a child’s accomplishments. When children succeed, parents can claim that they are meeting cultural expectations. In fact, many Page 82mothers and fathers feel that their moral worth as parents is associated with the visible achievements of their children—a factor that further intensifies parental commitment to youth sports.

To meet cultural expectations for the “good parent,” mothers and fathers often are attracted to youth sport programs that use symbols of progressive achievement and skill development. Karate, with achievement levels signified by belt colors, is appealing to some because the visible and quantifiable achievements of their children can be used as proof of their parental moral worth. (Source: © Jay Coakley)

Third, many people today believe that informal, child-controlled activities inevitably lead to trouble—much like what occurs in the novel, Lord of the Flies. When young people are seen as threats to social order, organized sports are seen as ideal activities to keep them occupied, out of trouble, and under the control of adults.

Fourth, many parents, responding to fear-producing news stories about murders and child abductions now see the world outside the home as dangerous for their children. They regard organized sports as safe alternatives to informal activities that occur outside the home without adult supervision. Even when organized sports have high injury rates and uncertified coaches, parents still feel that organized programs are needed to protect their children.

Fifth, the visibility of high-performance and professional sports has increased awareness of organized competitive sports as a valued part of culture.As children watch sports on television, listen to parents and friends talk about sports, and hear about the wealth and fame of popular athletes, they often see organized youth sports, especially those modeled after professional sports, as attractive activities. And when children say they want to be gymnasts or basketball players, parents often try to nurture these dreams by seeking the best-organized programs in those sports. Therefore, organized youth sports have become popular partly because children see them as enjoyable and Page 83culturally valued activities that will enhance their status among peers and adults.

Sixth, the culture of childhood play has nearly disappeared in most segments of post-industrial society, especially in the United States. Children today have few opportunities to engage in spontaneous play—activities that involve creativity, expressiveness, joy, and “ownership” possessed by the participants themselves (Christakis and Christakis, 2010). Structured, achievement-oriented activities now begin early in children’s lives (Hyman, 2012). These activities, including organized sports for preschoolers, are controlled by adults and provide few opportunities for children to play, which often is seen as a “waste of time.” Instead, the focus is on improvement and measurable development that will pay off for a child in the future. Parents seek developmental activities that they hope will help their children experience academic and future occupational success. 

Time for play has become a low priority in most families (Glenn et al., 2013; Singh and Gupta, 2012). Parents also restrict the spaces for play by keeping children in the house and yard, unless they live on a cul-de-sac where there is no traffic and where children know they are being watched by one neighbor or another (Hochschild, 2013). Even the language of play has nearly disappeared as children learn to describe and evaluate their experiences in instrumental terms rather than by using a vocabulary of emotions and expression—so they talk about activities in terms of what they have learned and accomplished rather than how they felt while they participated.

Together, these six social changes have boosted the popularity of organized youth sports in recent decades. Knowing about them helps to explain why parents invest so many family resources into the organized sports participation of their children. The amount of money that parents spend on participation fees, equipment, travel, personal coaches, high-performance training sessions, and other items defined as necessary in many programs has skyrocketed in recent years (Farrey, 2008; Hyman, 2012). For example, the parents of elite youth hockey players who travel to regional and national tournaments often spend more than $10,000 per year to support their sons’ hockey participation. They justify the costs by saying that being a hockey player benefits their sons in many ways. Other parents have gone even further—remortgaging houses and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to nurture the sport dreams of a child (Hyman, 2012; Weir, 2006).

Children’s play is so focused on lessons and leagues [that] kids aren’t getting a chance to practice policing themselves. When they have that opportunity, … the results are clear: Self-regulation improves —Alix Spiegel, PBS, Morning Edition (2008)

One of the troubling issues raised by these changes is that mothers and fathers in working-class and lower-income households are increasingly defined as irresponsible and “bad” parents because they lack the resources to fund sport participation for their children as wealthier parents do. Parents without resources may also be perceived as uninterested in nurturing the dreams of their children, even though this is far from true. In this way, organized sports for children become linked to political issues and debates about family values and the moral worth of parents in lower-income households.

MAJOR TRENDS IN YOUTH SPORTS TODAY

In addition to their growing popularity, youth sports are changing in five socially significant ways.

First, organized programs are becoming increasingly privatized. This means that more youth sports today are sponsored by private and commercial organizations, and fewer are sponsored by public, tax-supported organizations such as park and recreation departments.

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Second, organized programs increasingly emphasize the “performance ethic.” This means that participants in youth sports, even in recreational programs, are encouraged to evaluate experiences in terms of their progress in developing technical skills and moving to higher levels of competition.

Third, there’s an increase in private, elite sport-training facilities dedicated to producing highly skilled and specialized athletes who can compete at the highest levels of youth sports. This means that parents often spend significant amounts of money to buy sport training for their children, and they see youth sport expenditures as financial investments in their children’s future.

Fourth, parents are increasingly involved in and concerned about the participation and success of their children in organized youth sports. This means that youth sports are now serious activities for both adults and children, and adults are more likely to act in extreme ways as they advocate what they perceive to be the interests of their children.

Fifth, participation in alternative and action sports has increased. This means that many young people prefer unstructured, participant-controlled activities such as skateboarding, in-line skating, snowboarding, BMX biking, disc golf, Ultimate, slacklining, foot-bag (hacky sack), climbing, jumping rope, and other sports that have local or regional relevance.

These five trends have an impact on who plays and what happens in organized youth sports. This is discussed in the following sections and in the box “ Sponsorship Matters: Variations in the Purpose of Organized Youth Sports .”

reflect on SPORTS

Sponsorship Matters: Variations in the Purpose of Organized Youth Sports

The purpose of organized youth sports often varies with the goals of those who sponsor them. Sources and forms of sponsorship differ from one program to another, but they generally fall into one of the following four categories:

1. Public, tax-supported community recreation organizations. This includes local park and recreation departments and community centers, which traditionally offer free or low-cost sport programs for children. The programs are usually inclusive and emphasize overall participation, health, general skill development, and enjoyment.

2. Public-interest, nonprofit community organizations. These include the YMCA, Boys and Girls Clubs, the Police Athletic League (PAL), and other community-based organizations, which traditionally have provided a limited range of free or low-fee sport programs for children. The goals of these programs are diverse, including everything from providing a “wholesome, Christian atmosphere” for playing sports to providing “at-risk children” with opportunities to play sports and keep them off the streets.

3. Private-interest, nonprofit sport organizations. These include organizations such as the nationwide Little League, Inc., Rush Soccer ( rushsoccer.com ), Pop Warner Football, and local organizations operating independently or through connections with larger sport organizations, such as national federations like USA Swimming. These organizations usually offer more exclusive opportunities to selective groups of children, generally those with special skills from families who can afford relatively costly participation fees.

4. Private commercial clubs. These include gymnastics, tennis, skating, soccer, and other sport clubs and training programs. These organizations have costly membership and participation fees, and some emphasize intense training, progressive and specialized skill development, and elite competition.

Because these sponsors each have different missions, the sports programs they fund are likely to offer different types of experiences for children and families. This makes it difficult to draw general conclusions about what happens in organized programs and how participation affects child development, public health, and family dynamics.

When public funds disappear due to tax cuts, one of the first things to be eliminated is youth sport programs—the type in category 1 (above). This has many effects. It limits opportunities for children from low-income families and funnels them into only one or two sports that may survive the cuts. Additionally, it creates a demand for youth sports in the remaining three sponsorship categories. But sponsors in categories 3 and 4 thrive only when they serve people with the money to pay for their programs.

Overall, this means that the opportunities and experiences available to young people are influenced by local, state, and national politics, especially those related to taxation and public spending. At present, youth sport opportunities and experiences are strongly influenced by voters and political representatives who make decisions about taxes and how they are used in local communities. Do you think that people in your community would vote to increase taxes to support youth sports? If not, what reasons would they give for voting against such a tax?

The Privatization of Organized Programs

Privatization is a prevalent trend in youth sports today. Although organized sports are widely popular in the United States, there has been a decline in publicly funded youth programs with free and inclusive participation policies. As governments face budget crises various social services, including youth sports, have been downsized or eliminated. Some publicly funded programs have survived by imposing participation fees, but most have been eliminated. In response, middle- and upper-middle-class parents have organized private, nonprofit sport clubs and leagues for their children. These organizations depend on fund-raising, membership dues, and corporate sponsorships. They offer opportunities to children from well-to-do families and neighborhoods, but they’re usually too expensive and inconveniently located for children from low-income families and neighborhoods.

If a family doesn’t think their huge investment in expensive sport is going to turn their child into an Olympian or professional athlete, they are often walking away from sport completely. —Barry Shepley, Hall of Fame Triathlon Coach, 2010 (in Richard, 2010)

Private, commercial programs also have become major providers of youth sports as public programs have been eliminated. But they are selective and exclusive, and they provide few opportunities for children from low-income households. The technical instruction in these programs often is good, and they provide closely regulated skills training for children from wealthier families. In addition, some parents hire private coaches for their children at rates of $50 to $200 per hour.

There are two negative consequences of privatizing youth sports. First, privatized programs reproduce the economic and ethnic inequalities that exist in the larger society. Unlike public programs, they depend on the resources of individual participants, rather than entire communities. Low-income and single-parent families often lack money to pay for dues, travel, equipment, and other fees. To the extent that income, family wealth, and support systems are less available to members of ethnic minorities, youth sports often create and accentuate ethnic segregation and social-class divisions in communities.

Second, as public park and recreation departments cease to offer programs, they often become Page 85brokers of park spaces and rent them to private sport programs. The rental fees are usually reasonable, which means that these private programs benefit from tax-supported facilities without being held accountable for running their programs to benefit the entire community. For example, private programs may not be committed to gender equity or other policies of inclusion that are a key part of public programs.

When privatization occurs, market forces shape who plays youth sports under what conditions. People with resources don’t see this as a problem Page 86because they have the money to pay for their children’s participation and choose the programs they want. But people with few resources face a double bind: They can’t pay for their children’s participation, and they often are accused of not caring for, controlling, or taking an interest in their children. In this way, privatized youth sport programs disproportionately affect poor people with little political power; therefore, these problems receive little attention from the media and most current politicians.

This point was noted by John Thomas, a director of coaching for United States Youth Soccer, who observed that in all his travels across the United States over the last decade, he’d never seen a travel team with mostly African American girls. In response to this observation, sociologist Paul Kooistra from Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, suggested that private, fee-based youth sports in the United States are used by some upper-middle-class parents as a tool to “separate themselves and their children from lower social classes and minorities” (Wells, 2008). 

Upper-middle-class parents may disagree with Kooistra’s statement, but they cannot deny that their children play sports primarily with other children from families that are white and well-off. Poor, working-class, and ethnic minority children are not formally excluded, but they are not on the playing fields. Of course, this has been true of private sport clubs in golf, tennis, swimming, and other sports for over a century, but the privatization of youth sports has re-created a twenty-first century form of ethnic and class segregation in among many populations of young people.

Emphasis on the Performance Ethic

The performance ethic is a set of ideas and beliefs emphasizing that the quality of the sport experience can be measured in terms of improved skills and competitive success. This ethic is widely emphasized in youth sport programs to the point that fun now means improving skills, becoming more competitive, winning, and being promoted into elite performance categories. “Travel teams” are now an important category in many sports because they separate certain young people from others on the basis of skills. Many parents like this because it enables them to judge their child’s progress and prove to themselves and others that they are “good parents” because they have “created talented children.”

Private and commercial programs emphasize the performance ethic to a greater degree than do public programs. Their directors and coaches market them as “centers of athletic excellence” to attract parents willing to pay high fees for membership, participation, and instruction. In some cases, the profiles and achievements of successful athletes and coaches who have trained or worked in the program are highlighted to justify costly memberships and dues.

Parents of physically skilled children sometimes define expensive membership fees, equipment, travel, and training expenses as investments in their children’s future (Hyman, 2012). They also use performance-oriented programs to develop social networks that can provide information about college sports, scholarships, coaches, and elite training programs. Overall, they want their children’s sport participation to bring developmental, educational, and eventual occupational payoffs.

Of course, the application of the performance ethic is not limited to organized sports; it influences a range of organized children’s activities, and it is changing childhood from a time of exploration and freedom to a time of preparation and controlled learning (Chudacoff, 2007; Elkind, 2007). In this sense, children’s sports are part of this larger trend.

Elite, Specialized Sport Programs

The emphasis on performance is also tied to a third trend in youth sports—the development of elite, specialized training programs and leagues. Many private and commercial programs encourage early specialization in a single sport because they have year-round operating expenses that can be paid only if people pay year-round membership fees. If young people played multiple sports and did not pay dues through the entire year, these programs could not to meet expenses or Page 87produce profits. Therefore, owners and staff develop clever rationales to convince parents and athletes that year-round participation in a single sport is necessary to stay on track for future success. As parents accept these rationales, “high-performance” teams and clubs grow in number and size.

As publicly funded youth sports are downsized or eliminated, private clubs provide participation opportunities. Membership fees in club programs are too costly for most families, and children may not enjoy the emphasis on the performance ethic in these programs. This is especially true in gymnastics where costs and demands for excellence are extreme (Source: © Thomas Coex/AFP/Getty Images)

Commercial clubs for gymnastics, figure skating, ice hockey, soccer, tennis, volleyball, lacrosse, and other sports now

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