healthykids
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 phenomenon believe that youth sports—which on the surface, appear to provide a perfect environment for children to learn life lessons and develop critical social and physical skills—might hamper our children’s healthy physical, social, psychic and creative development.
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 University 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 settings. 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 Pediatrics study attests that free and unstructured play is healthy and essential for helping children reach important social, emotional and cognitive developmental milestones, plus managing stress and becoming resilient. Payne observes, “In free play,
children have to actively problem solve and take one another’s feelings into account if the play is to be successful. In sports, the social problem solving is largely extrinsic, facilitated by coaches, referees or parents. During a child’s formative
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