Illustration: Hannah Bachman
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The school year is over, along with practice schedules and playoffs, but most sports can still play year-round if they so choose. And now summer leagues, clinics and development camps begin. We’re all familiar with the criticisms of the exponential growth of youth sports over the past few decades. Critics argue that investing so much time and money in increasingly competitive and overheated recreational sports isn’t necessarily good for kids. And yet youth sports culture seems to be on a trajectory of more, faster and stronger, thanks in part to billions of dollars in private equity investment. It all has to be worth it in the end, right?
Parents continue to participate, even as they complain about the time and financial commitments that even local leagues demand. It makes me wonder what the lesser-known reasons are for choosing sports parenting. Beyond the obvious ones — motivation for the child, parental pride in the child’s achievements, the enjoyment of a shared activity — are there any other reasons? do Can parents opt out of an all-encompassing youth sports culture?
I’ve always suspected that some parents are willing to sacrifice their own free time by enrolling their kids in demanding sports schedules in exchange for a robust peace of mind that’s hard to find anywhere else. Driving your kids to activities on the weekends (and this goes beyond sports, like a chess team) might mean sacrificing time for your own enjoyment, but it can also silence that nagging feeling of not showing up as a parent. Sports even settles the point of showing up; sitting in the stands and staring counts as support. In an age of anxiety-ridden parenting, being a committed sports parent is a path to guilt-freedom. Driving to the games, buying the equipment, and peace of mind.
I spoke to sports-loving parents I know about why sports are worth it, despite the time and expense. A mother of two boys under 10 who play ice hockey, baseball, and lacrosse on the West Coast told me that attending practice as a volunteer coach helps her stay active, and that the friendships she has with other parents are genuine, especially as they get older. “I get to interact with other people, but we’re focused on the kids and the logistics and the action, and no one expects anything else. There’s no pressure to have conversations, make friends, talk about yourself, and do things that can be stressful as adults.” A basketball dad on the East Coast remembers how sports were essential to keeping him focused and focused as a child, and he wants his kids to develop that same identity and confidence. Another basketball dad noted that the time commitments tend to be incremental, and he rarely realizes he’s becoming a committed sports parent until the contract is signed.
For an outsider like me, it’s tempting to take a cynical approach to sports parenting, to assume that the increased competition and costs are simply a reflection of the accelerated competition (and budget cuts to more carefree public programs) happening in other parts of civil society. And that’s certainly part of it. But youth sports is its own world, one in which parents are welcome to participate and belong. In the absence of an inherited example of what “family time” looks like, sports provides it.
In the new book What are children for?In The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, co-written with Anastasia Berg, Rachel Weisman admits that one of the reasons she wasn’t sure she wanted children was because she had no idea what she wanted to do with her future family. Her book was one of the first to articulate something I often think about: the process by which families figure out what their family culture will look like when the beliefs and traditions themselves are no longer there.
In Wiseman’s case, her parents were loving and hardworking, but they didn’t model for her what it meant to have fun as a family. Her parents’ lives were “closed and revolved around their work.” When they planned family outings or trips, young Rachel saw them as stressed and tired. They did everything to make her and her sister happy, but they never showed her what happiness looked like. “With relatives far away and our nuclear family fragmented, we had few shared traditions or common experiences to fall back on,” she writes.
Wiseman refers to philosopher Agnes Callard’s concept of “receptive parenting,” which is parenting in which parents encourage their children to define happiness for themselves, rather than imposing it on them through their own values and habits. This contemporary parenting style is seen as a way to avoid alienating children by leaving it up to them to decide what is fun and interesting for them. Receptive parenting is also a natural by-product of over-involved parenting: signing up your child for as many activities as possible and hoping something works out. “Instead of moral guides, parents become talent scouts and trend forecasters in their own households, doing their best to expose their children to as many activities and opportunities as possible,” Wiseman writes. Meanwhile, “children can only infer the deeper, less clearly expressed expectations of adults through hidden patterns and signs.”
In Wiseman’s view, acceptance parenting can create a “lack of traction” feeling in kids, like their “wheels are spinning in a void.” Being an athletic family seems like insurance against this feeling, for both kids and parents: a way to raise kids with structure and discipline without alienating them by insisting on following traditions that may seem arbitrary and unfair.
Wiseman eventually changed his mind and decided that having a family appealed, in part because he was encouraged by seeing close friends trying to do so. If you have the time and energy, creating your own family culture can be a creative adventure, a project to create a world in which your kids can join in on what you’re passionate about, at least for a while. Sports organizations create worlds in the same way, with the benefit of established rules and rituals that spare parents the trouble of having to invent them from scratch.
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