Sports are extremely important in the lives of children. Team sports instill character traits that will help children be successful for the rest of their lives. Commitment, teamwork, work ethic, responsibility, communication skills, and accountability are all traits that you can learn from playing sports. All of these skills are valuable in life outside of sports as well. I think most would agree that playing sports is beneficial to youth development however; the idea of specialization in youth sports is a topic that reveals more controversy.
Parents tend to all believe that their children are going to be superstar athletes and will do anything they can to make sure that is how the story unfolds as life goes on. Every kid wants a college scholarship and every parent would love that too. Anything to decrease that tuition payment is a plus. With that being said, it may seem like a good idea for kids to focus on one sport early on and only train for that. Why waste time working on other sports that you could be using to practice that sport you’re going to go pro in, right? Well most don’t understand the effect that early specialization in sports has on the children playing and the effect it has on the child’s athletic future.
Burnout is essentially what you risk if you allow for your son or daughter to specialize in sports early on. To clarify, early on doesn’t mean middle school. Early on means pre-pubescent, youth sports, peewee football, early on. Asking a child to decide what the rest of their life will be committed to at an early age is ludicrous. They don’t even know what their interests will be or honestly what they want to eat for snack time that day. What tends to happen is the parent will decide that they are best at baseball so for two hours a day, every day, that child and his dad will go outside and work on defense, offense, pitching, etc. and there becomes increased pressure for that child to succeed. Increased pressures like that on a young child can, without a doubt, lead to mental health concerns. Not only that but like I mentioned before, burnout is the biggest risk. Most children will get burnt out on whatever they are doing if they do it long enough and can not find the fun in it anymore. After all, we shouldn’t do anything if we aren’t enjoying it. Also, it is important to allow children to build independence early by experiencing all the different things they want to and learning what they do and don’t like. Part of being a child and one of my favorite childhood memories was going outside and playing sports with my neighbors. We’d play football, basketball, and baseball. We even tried our own versions of tennis and volleyball because we didn’t have a net on the street. We were active kids. Our parents let us play what we wanted and when it was time to join organized sports, each of us took on a few. We gravitated towards the ones we were better at and then in high school we decided on one to play. I personally think that is what was best for me. I was able to become an athlete, not just a softball player. I was able to decide for myself what I liked and work on the things I wanted and it paid off, as I am now a collegiate athlete. Sports are great but only if we treat them as the games they truly are and allow the kids to just enjoy them while they aren’t so competitive.
