healthykids
fect environment for children to learn life lessons and develop critical social and physical skills—might hamper our children’s healthy physical, social, psy- chic and creative development.
Whole Child Sports Free Play Earns the Winning Score by Luis Fernando Llosa
M
any parents concerned that their children are getting engulfed by social media often turn to sports
to spark physical activity. They scramble to sign their toddlers up for swimming and tennis lessons, T-ball and soccer practice, hoping these activities will teach their kids about motivation and leadership, while getting them off the couch and out the door. They hope that sports will be a conduit for their kids to
learn what it takes to strive, drive toward a goal and succeed in later life. As a result, more than 40 million
kids across America are engaged in organized play. But youth sports are not a panacea; while parental intentions are good, they sometimes don’t realize the potential for negative consequences. Those that have studied the phenom- enon believe that youth sports—which on the surface, appear to provide a per-
Too Much Too Soon It seems that many young kids playing on teams today are over-coached by controlling, command-oriented adults. As Jenny Levy, head coach of the Uni- versity of North Carolina’s 2013 NCAA champion women’s lacrosse team at Chapel Hill puts it, “Kids are kind of like overbred dogs, mimicking the drills we run in practice. They aren’t wired to think creatively. They do what they know. What’s safe.” This kind of behavior can start at an early age, when kids should be engaging in free play with minimal adult supervision in unstructured set- tings. Parenting expert Kim John Payne, author of Simplicity Parenting and The Soul of Discipline, says, “Parents are giving in to enormous societal pressure to push kids into high-performance sports settings several times a week. It’s an ‘arms race’ of sorts, with the clear victims being the kids themselves that are robbed of their childhoods.” There’s a much more holistic way kids can experience play, including sports. An American Academy of Pedi- atrics study attests that free and unstruc- tured play is healthy and essential for
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