Is the Pressure of Youth Sports Too Much for Our Kids? - Chris Bjork

0:04You're listening to the Mindful Mama podcast episode number 564. Today we're talking about is the pressure of youth sports too much for our kids? With Chris Bjork.

0:18Welcome to the Mindful Mama podcast. Here it's about becoming a less irritable, more joyful parent. At Mindful Mama, we know that you cannot give what you do not have. And when you have calm and peace within, then you can give it to your children. I'm your host, Hunter Clark-Fields. I help smart, thoughtful parents stay calm so they can have strong, connected relationships with their children. I've been practicing mindfulness for over 25 years. I'm the creator of the Mindful Parenting course and teacher training, and I'm the author of the international bestseller Raising Good Humans, Raising Good Humans Every Day, and the Raising Good Humans Guided Journal.

0:56Are you driving your kids all over the place for sports? Maybe you're listening to this now while you're driving your kid or driving to get your kid from a practice or whatever. It's pretty likely. And if so, this is the perfect episode for you because I'm going to be talking to Chris Bjork, a professor of education at Vassar College. His research focuses on youth sports, educational reform, and international comparative education. And he wrote a book about youth sports, More Than Just a Game. So we are going to dive into it. Are these sports helping our kids thrive or are they pushing them too hard?

1:35We will get into it. So let's, I guess, get into it. Can I say that any more times? Should I say it again? Let's get into it. Join me at the table as I talk to Chris Bjork.

1:54Have you ever wondered who the Mary was from Bloody Mary? If the Loch Ness Monster was real or if Ouija boards actually worked? On each episode of the family-friendly Unspookable, we look at the histories and mysteries behind your favorite scary stories, myths, and urban legends to get the real stories behind the scares. Want to solve your next mystery? Find and follow Unspookable now, wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, Chris. Welcome to the Mindful Mama podcast. Hi, thanks for having me. Well, I'm glad you're here. And to kind of give you some insight into where I'm coming from with this, we're going to be talking about kids and sports and things.

2:39And I was very much personally of the mindset of like, I want to, I kind of want to not actually get my kids super involved in organized sports until maybe they're older. um they're you know I figure when they're five and six and seven and eight I want them to just be having some free play and things like that but now my daughter who is 15 is really into field hockey and I'm psyched that she's like in this team sport and getting all these like team sport um benefits and things like that and you you know you have researched uh team sports and and the kind of the way it's changed over the years in your book, More Than Just a Game.

3:26And I was just wondering about what inspired you to do this research, and if there was some kind of personal moment that made you think that we really needed to talk about this? Sure. Well, I wrote the book, More Than a Game, with a colleague of mine, Bill Hoynes, and we decided to go on this journey after an informal conversation. We shared that as parents, We felt like the current state of youth sports was so different from what we had experienced as kids. And it's become so intense and profit-driven and pressurized. And even though we felt like we had a good handle on the industry, we had trouble making good decisions for our kids because we had no experience to draw from.

4:10When we were kids, you played for the local Little League or AYSO team or for your high school, and that was kind of it. But things have changed so radically. And now parents experience incredible pressure when their kids are still in elementary school to specialize, to do whatever they can to give their kids competitive edges. And that isn't always in the interest of the kids themselves. And so we were motivated to do this project and write the book to give parents information that would help them make wise decisions for their kids. And what sports were your kids doing? They were playing, they both played soccer and baseball, and I actually coached one of my kids' soccer teams.

4:54And so you would think that I would have this depth of experience that would make me really secure when I had to make decisions for my own sons. But it's really hard also because you get so emotionally wrapped up in it, and that makes it difficult to kind of step back and have a balanced perspective. And we wrote the book with the intent of helping parents kind of gain that larger perspective and not get sucked in and just do whatever all their friends were doing. Yeah. I mean, I imagine that emotional component of, you know, you're proud of your kid, you're excited for them, you're kind of living vicariously through them in some way.

5:32And also, you don't want to hold them back, all of these things. But your book talks about how taxing the athletics can be developmentally for children. And I'm wondering, what are some of the ways, can we pull this out? Are competitive sports actually hindering kids' growth? Right. I think for a lot of kids, they are, and that occurs on a couple of different levels. So one, if we look at the physical effects on kids, because young athletes are being pressured to specialize and play one sport all year round when they're still 7, 8, 9, 10 years old. That has implications for their bodies. They're not fully developed.

6:16And if you're playing a single sport 11, 12 months in a year, that puts great stress on your bodies. We also interviewed physical therapists and college coaches, and they found that there's been a large increase in injuries to knees, shoulders, elbows, ankles, because young bodies aren't built to withstand those kind of pressures. But I would also add there's implications for students' mental health, kids' mental health, that kids feel pressure now because their identities are so wrapped up in how they perform in a single sport that if they don't feel like they're living up to expectations, that can create stress and all sorts of psychological impact.

7:00And also, if they're specializing when they're 8 or 9 or 10, what happens if they no longer are interested in that sport? So you know very well that kids' interests change as they get older. But today, a lot of kids feel this pressure to specialize and stick to a single sport when they're in elementary school. And their whole identity gets caught up in that sport. So it's hard to step back, to let low, to maybe engage in that sport less intensively. And especially with young women, that can have real serious consequences where they kind of lose their sense of self if they're not performing at a high level in gymnastics or softball or basketball, whatever the sport may be.

7:45Yeah, we were talking about it this morning and someone who works on the Mindful Mama Mentor team was saying, yeah, I was into figure skating and it was really intense. And, you know, you're saying that it can have these detrimental effects. Like what, how does it affect kids? Say you've done a sport very intensely and then you get injured out or age out or you're just not good enough at some young age like 12 or 14 or something. How does that affect kids? Right. It can be devastating because I think when we were kids, we were engaged in many different activities. So we may, you or I may have played, I don't know, basketball for a couple of months and then swam for a couple of months and then been in a play.

8:30And so that reduced the pressure. If someone wasn't doing as well in any one activity, they had all these different ways to show that they were accomplished or talented or just really interesting people. But now, because they often specialize in one thing, that if they're cut or if they get injured or whatnot, it causes them to question their own self-worth. And that's not healthy for anyone. And we're especially seeing that when people get to the stages of high school where they're starting to develop from, you know, adolescents into adults. And when that grounding, that foundational part of their development gets yanked from under them, they can get really depressed.

9:19Yeah. And I imagine there's this, you know, it's a huge time commitment, right? I know that people spend lots of time traveling and doing all these things and maybe practicing every day with pretty young kids. And how do you see these schedules affecting family life and also thinking about the idea of child's opportunity for downtime, creativity, and free play? These things that I was really trying to prioritize when my kids were little. Absolutely. And what we found also is that most parents sign their kids up to play sports with really good intentions. They want their children to get some exercise, to make friends, to kind of nowadays they're attracted to the idea that they aren't going to just sit in front of a computer all the time.

10:16And most importantly, to have fun. That's why most kids start playing sports. But what we found is that that can shift really quickly now. So maybe for a year or two, the child will play in a recreational league or, you know, with neighborhood kids or informally. But now parents are under this pressure to do whatever they can to make their children exceptional. And that means oftentimes signing up for these competitive travel teams. And they get sucked into that very quickly. and they think if they don't sign their kids up for boarding activities, you know, that practice seven, eight, nine, ten hours a week, that their child is going to be at a disadvantage.

11:03And as a result of that, the time commitment, the financial commitment escalates really quickly. And there's a good chance that a nine-year-old will be playing volleyball four days a week, traveling to a different state, being pressured to go to summer camps. And then that affects the athlete, but it also affects their whole family because parents feel compelled to drive them to away tournaments, to invest a lot of money. I mean, we met many parents who were struggling financially, but they would do whatever they could to pay the fees for these teams and tournaments. And the other thing I'd mention is other kids in the family are affected because the parents become so obligated to spend so much time supporting that one child's athletic career that oftentimes other children in the family are neglected and feel like they aren't getting the attention from their parents.

12:00So it affects almost everyone. We talked to one parent who said, when you sign up a child for a travel team, you're signing the whole family up.

12:13Stay tuned for more Mindful Mama podcasts right after this break.

12:42dread. Hi, I'm Katie Ferraro, college nutrition professor and dietician specializing in baby lead weaning. And I host the baby lead weaning made easy podcast. Each week we cover evidence based safe infant feeding practices for parents and caregivers of babies who are six to 12 months of age. So if you're confused by all the conflicting info you hear about starting solid foods, or you want easy actionable tips on how to safely prep food for your baby or introduce allergenic foods or figure out when to drop a milk feed, we cover all that and more plus interviews with the world's leading feeding experts in two new episodes each week.

13:14Search Baby Lead Weaning wherever you listen to podcasts and happy feeding. I'm curious about, I mean, do the kids, how do they gauge, how do you gauge whether your kid is really loving this or enjoying this enough to justify that kind of stress and expense on the family, But also like that, I mean, for me, that piece about not having time for free play or not having downtime, I imagine that's also maybe setting them up for, you know, we know that free play leads to creativity and that's how little kids work out their world. That's how kids, you know, process different things that have happened to them.

14:00Downtime is when creativity happens. That's when you get, like, the great big box and the, you know, all of those things. And I've seen, you know, how that creativity can lead to, you know, creativity as an older person, too. I mean, so I'm just wondering about sort of the losses of these things as well. Right, right. And one of the messages that we really emphasize in the book is the importance of creating balance in kids' lives. When parents are making decisions about what team to sign their child up for, what activity will work best for them to try and put together kind of a collection of activities, some that may challenge them physically, some that may challenge them artistically, others that will encourage them to collaborate with others, and that it's really important to structure their extracurricular lives so there is that balance, that they are developing their bodies, their minds, their ability to interact with other kids.

15:04But that can get thrown out of whack when the child at age eight is playing baseball five days a week with no downtime. And then on top of that, there's so much stress early on to try and attract the attention of college coaches to be better than others rather than to work in collaboration with their peers. And as a parent, it's really hard not to buy into that in today's environment, where all the messages they're getting, where everything on Facebook suggests what matters is to show that you're better than everyone else and that your child is truly extraordinary? What's wrong with just being, you know, kind of balanced and happy?

15:49I would argue for the latter. We kind of grounded our analysis in this book, all the arguments we're making in stories and reports that actual parents told us. So we wanted to hear from parents that are involved in this, what their experiences are. And one parent told us that the whole sports world today is very time-consuming. The time commitment, the financial commitment is more than you expect, and you have to be really, really prepared for that. And another told us that it may seem like a child is going to benefit from this more intense sports environment, but the pressure ratchets up very quickly and creates pressure on their kids.

16:34And so it's so important to create space where kids can, and to talk to their kids about what they're doing so they can let the parent know that they want to scale back a little bit. Or maybe they want to stop playing field hockey and be in a play instead, or to do something else. And that maybe they'll come back to sports later, but to make that flexibility part of family life. It's so interesting to me because I think, like, I've thought about this when my girls were in swim team. We had a local swim team. I loved swim team because they learned how to swim really well, got them out of the house in the morning.

17:15Anyway, yeah, the swim team was great. I thought it was great. But then I would go to these meets and the meets were so long. And I'm thinking to myself, like, adults have designed this, we have made this as long and painful for ourselves as we can. And why did they do this? Like, why did I mean, adults design this? Why did they make this as long and painful, like five hour events, six hour events, as they are? And I don't understand it. So I guess I'm just kind of wondering, you have kind of two questions here, You know, I'm thinking you're talking about the investment that families are making and the pressure to make all this investment.

17:57A, like maybe for some people like that, I mean, does this, does it pay off for some people? I don't know. Like is when you're thinking about that investment, is it worth it? You're saying there's all these downsides. But also, why did it, why is it evolved this way? Like, I don't understand. It doesn't seem like it's in the best interest of kids for it to be so competitive and to be driving so far away and to have it cost so much money. I don't really understand why adults have designed it to make it this way. Right. You're absolutely right. And this all started to change in the 1980s. So before that point, most kids were playing in local recreational leagues or at their schools or whatnot.

18:46But then due to cuts in programming for sports, a lot of families didn't have opportunities to do those kinds of things. And what happened was these private entrepreneurs stepped in and saw that this was a market, that they could make a lot of money creating these opportunities for kids. And those sports entrepreneurs are the ones who created the travel teams, the private coaching, the specialized clinics, all of that. And as a result, it wasn't everyday parents that were making a lot of these decisions. It was private groups that were trying to make money off sports. And they marketed themselves very, very well.

19:27And they kind of planted the seed in parents that you needed to sign your kid up for as many different activities as possible or you weren't a good parent. And this was all tied into this shift towards intensive parenting that we can see in all aspects of life. So, for example, since the 1980s, there's been a tremendous growth in chances to sign up for private coaches to help your kid learn to do well on the balance beam, but also almost anything they want to do. For example, we found out that there are private spelling bee coaches who charge upwards of$300 so that kids can compete at the national level in the spelling bee.

20:10So part of it is these groups and individuals who are trying to make money, but part of it is also that parents are having trouble making decisions that ignore maybe what they really want for their children long term. So I'd just like to read a short excerpt of an interview I conducted with some parents. Sure. So a father we interviewed said, I think there's a problem and we're all part of the problem. We're all paying the fees and driving kids to these tournaments and worrying about winning games. We all have the right intentions, but we don't always follow through on them. And what was really interesting is the wife followed up with, I disagree.

20:52I don't think we all have the best intentions. I think a lot of parents want their kids to become professional athletes. It's disgusting. When I see what my kid is going through, it makes me worry. So there's this loss of agency that parents can't make decisions independent of these outside pressures of this intensive parenting trend. And also a lot of times kids' voices are lost. So one thing that we really encourage parents to think about is what kind of communication are they having with their kids? And are they checking in with them and asking them how they're enjoying a particular sport? If they need a break, if they want to try something else and letting them know if you want to reset, that's totally fine.

21:39You know, we'll support you whether you're on the all-star team or whether you decide that you wanted to be in Model UN. Okay. Yeah. So, I mean, it's interesting, though, because I guess I can see that you want to, you know, as a parent, you don't want to encourage your kid to quit. right? You don't want, you want them to see it out, et cetera. I remember feeling that tension when one daughter didn't want to do swim team. And I was like, oh, well, I don't want to, I don't want to encourage her to quit. You know, we don't want our kids to be quitters, right? Like that's like, that's like the worst thing you could possibly be in American culture is to be a quitter, right?

22:21Because we're in a culture of working hard. Yeah. At the same time, we do want to balance that with trusting them, having them have awareness of their own bodies and their own lives and whether they feel too much pressure or too much time in their schedule and things like that. I don't know. How do we navigate that? Well, I think part of it is, as I mentioned, just establishing open communication lines and constantly asking them how they're feeling about what they're doing. Another thing is to keep in mind what you ultimately hope your child is going to get out of playing these sports. So we interviewed hundreds of parents, and what we heard again and again was that what they really valued was the life lessons that their children get out of sports.

23:14Persistence, commitment, the ability to work with others, all those kinds of things. and not to lose sight of the fact that the kid might develop those skills, probably will develop them, regardless of the specific team they're on. They don't have to be at the most competitive level to learn persistence. And that sometimes it's in the kid's best interest not to aim for a college scholarship when that may not be what they even want. And on top of that, the reality is that between 1 % and 2 % of all kids who play high school sports end up getting a college scholarship, 1 % to 2%. But what's happened is because of this huge expansion of the travel team industry, there are millions more kids that are playing for a travel team.

24:06And a lot of times their parents think, if my kid is on the travel team, that they have a good shot at playing for the University of Michigan or getting a scholarship to UCLA. But that reality doesn't match what is likely to happen with their kid. And so it's really important to stay focused on those life lessons and how the kids are developing as people and not necessarily where they rank on the hierarchy of athletes. Yeah, I guess, you know, you want to say, like, is my kid super motivated to do this? Is the child driving this or is something else driving this? You know, and you answered that question, does it pay off one to two percent?

24:50maybe get these scholarships to go on. And yeah, and the kids are, yeah, where are they in this conversation? I mean, I guess that was another question is the idea of like, you know, are there other levels that they can be involved in? You know, can they drop back? And then how do parents communicate that, you know, When all the other families around them are doing this travel team and maybe this kid's in soccer and everybody else is going to aim for the travel team, how do you say no to that when there's that pressure for everybody else to be doing it? And how do you have that conversation with your child?

25:42That's a great question. And I'm glad you asked it because we are not, you know, Bill Hoings, my co-writer and I, are not anti-travel team. We're not against the idea that a child who's really motivated to specialize in a sport should do that. But we are against the idea that you need to do that when your child is really young to get a competitive advantage to help them become the best athlete that they can. We are just arguing that try and delay that specialization until they're physically ready to play a sport year-round and also mentally prepared to commit to a sport. Because if you push them into doing that or even accepting that when they're too young, they're likely to burn out physically or mentally.

26:36And as I said, when my kids were young, I kind of bought into that. I thought if I don't get them to play this sport intensively early, they're going to lose out. But what I've learned through this research is that if you're talented enough to get a college athletic scholarship, you're likely to stand out whether you start playing that sport when you're 8 or whether you're 12. And there's no rush. You know, a kid is not going to lose out on future opportunities if they wait to specialize. But we're just saying hold off until they're ready for that. And then maybe for some kids, it makes sense to join a team that plays their sport against teams in other states and regions.

27:23But for a lot of kids, it will make more sense to just play for the local Babe Ruth team or to play on their – or to swim on their high school swim team. And they're likely to get a lot out of it even if they're not the state champion. I mean, how many kids are going to be state champion in the 100 butterfly? Not very many, but a lot of kids can be on the swim team and get a lot out of it, even if they're the third best butterfly swimmer on their team.

27:55Stay tuned for more Mindful Mama podcast right after this break. Okay, Nicola, Quizfrage. Home Office Barstader oder Fahrtkosten? What brings us more? Wait, I'll check that quickly. Oha, Homeoffice wins. It brings us more than 150 euros a year. Yes, but why do you know this? Because VisoSteuer shows the payment live. That's just the tax app for all cases. Yes, and she also answers questions. 24-7 and without a German. That's just the app that understands us. Tax done. Safe. With VisoSteuer. Now try it out. Try it out. yeah all those lessons of teamwork and perseverance and all those things you know thinking about this idea of delaying you know for your child's physical development mental development to to be well-rounded you know i i read um kim payne's book simplicity parenting and he talks about the idea that when younger kids are when kids are younger what they're needing in a lot of ways is that free play, right?