May 5, 2007
What Happened with Kids and Sports in America? An Interview with Regan McMahon Posted by Allen Barra at 04:45 PM EST Regan McMahon’s Revolution in the Bleachers: How Parents Can Take Back Family Life in a World Gone Crazy Over Youth Sports (Gotham Books, 304 pages, $25.00) is one of the most important sports books so far in the twenty-first century. Any parents stressed out from hours of ferrying kids to baseball, soccer, or lacrosse games, or who have lost sleep wondering what sports they should pressure their kids into specializing in, needs to read it—and to recommend it to other parents. McMahon, a deputy book editor for the San Francisco Chronicle, answered these questions from her home in California. Your book, Revolution in the Bleachers, is a fascinating take on how youth sports have come to dominate American life—interrupting family meals, disrupting family vacations, things like that. You have two children of your own. Was your book developed out of personal experience?
Yes. I have two athletic kids who have played multiple team sports since early in grade school, although they didn't start in kindergarten, like many kids do these days. My daughter is now 13 and my son is 16, and they're still playing sports.
A couple of years ago, I had this moment when I was rushing to get my daughter across town from the soccer field to the volleyball gym, and she was changing uniforms and wolfing down a sandwich in the car, and my husband was at my son’s soccer game in another part of town, and I thought, this is nuts. And however tough it was for our family, with my kids playing at the recreation-league level and for their school teams, it was even harder for families with kids playing for elite club teams who were traveling far distances every weekend and staying in motels. I wanted to know: How did we get here? Why have things changed so much from when I was kid? Does it have to be this way, or is there room for change? I explored my questions in an article I wrote for The San Francisco Chronicle Magazine in March 2005 called “How Much Is Too Much?” It generated a tremendous response from readers. My book came out of that, allowing me to widen my scope and examine the issue on a national level. I was particularly interested how the runaway sports culture is affecting kids and family life. You write in your opening chapter, “When I started to think about why we parents are running around so much more than our parents did, I realized the biggest factor is the rise of sports programs for girls.” Has this enormous rise in organized sports for girls become a solution to our problems or merely compounded the problem itself? More girls playing sports has been great for girls, but it has increased the logistical challenges for parents. If you’ve got a boy and a girl, you may be running around twice as much as my parents’ generation was, when perhaps only the boy was going to practices and games during grade school and middle school. And now it seems that nearly all kids start soccer when they’re four years old. Having gender equity in government-funded school programs through Title IX is morally and socially important, but one unexpected and potentially troublesome ripple effect is an increased focus on getting college scholarships. When the Title IX rules were clarified and fully implemented in 1992 (even though this amendment to the Civil Rights Act had been signed into law by President Nixon in 1972!), the floodgates were opened, and many colleges suddenly had to field teams and give out scholarship money in women’s sports that they had never had to before. Suddenly there was lots of opportunity for women athletes. The women who did so well at the 1996 and 2000 Olympic games and won the 1999 Women’s World Cup in soccer were referred to as “Title IX babies,” because they were the ones who had benefited from the explosion in women's collegiate sports. When parents saw the results on TV, many started thinking their daughter could be the next Mia Hamm or Brandi Chastain. And it wasn’t limited to girls. The notion that my kid can get a college scholarship if he or she starts early and trains hard enough really took hold in the youth sports culture for both boys and girls. But the reality is that less that one percent of all the children who play youth sports ever get a college scholarship. What’s happened, then, is that today’s kids are sacrificing a lot and giving up a lot of traditional aspects of childhood in service of this statistically unrealistic expectation, a goal that may stem more from the parents’ needs and desires than from what the children themselves truly want. One of the most interesting points you make is that youth sports culture has diminished one of the most important aspects of family life, namely family meals. “Eating together,” you write, “is the cornerstone of family life, the ritual that nourishes us in more ways than one. It’s the time kids learn manners, learn to listen to their siblings, absorb adult vocabulary, their parents express opinions about the day’s event in terms that reflect their values as members of this family and part of the community.” What’s your advice on how we can reclaim what’s being taken from us? I encourage parents to embrace eating dinner together as a family value and make it a priority. It can be a challenge with everyone’s busy schedules, but if you believe it’s too important to let fall by the wayside, you will make it happen—if not seven days a week, then five. If not five, then at least three. If you eat dinner together less often than that, family members can start to feel unconnected, and parents and siblings may start to lose track of what’s happening in each other's lives and in the life of the family. The family dinner is a great place for kids to feel listened to and understood. There’s been quite a lot of research done by Columbia University, whose National Center on Abuse and Addiction has conducted national surveys on this since 1996 and consistently found that kids who eat dinner often with their families are less likely to be depressed or get involved with drugs, alcohol, or cigarettes.
The trouble with sports schedules is that it’s hard to find practice times when the coaches—many of whom are volunteer—can make it and when fields and gyms are available. So if your team schedules a practice from six to eight, a typical window for dinnertime, what are you going to do? Well, if the coach values family dinners, or the parents made it clear that they value the family dinner, maybe that could be factored into the decision-making when the coach or the league or the school administration is deciding on practice times. But if you can’t change what the team is doing, you can make adjustments at your end, like eating together early, before practice, or late, after practice, to preserve the dinner ritual and all the benefits that come from it. You can also consider the dinner factor when you make choices about extracurricular activates. For example, when you think about signing up for a sport or a lesson or a class, or attending an “optional” extra practice per week, look at the calendar. If you realize, “But that would mean we’d only have two nights a week when we can eat together as a family,” maybe it would be appropriate to say no, or to look for an alternative at a different time. Children need time to relate to and communicate with their family in a relaxed setting. It helps family members stay in touch with what’s going on with one another and helps children feel grounded and loved, which will serve them in good stead during adolescence, when there are lots of temptations, distractions, and outside influences. My favorite chapter in your book is “Child’s Play,” which deals with what you call the most dramatic change in American childhoods over the last couple of decades, namely the “decline and near disappearance of unstructured play.” If I’m reading you correctly, you’re saying that we’ve allowed play to be taken out of our kids’ lives and replaced with training. Would you call that an accurate assessment? What would you recommend that all of us as parents could do to bring back the notion of play into children’s sports? Yes, that’s about the size of it. I sensed there was a problem, but I had no idea of the extent of it till I started doing my research. I had no idea that bike sales were way down and that the Lego company, which had been recession-proof since it went into business in the 1930s, had suffered a downturn and closed factories last year. These companies could be in trouble because kids don’t have time for free play anymore. As I say in my book, when little kids don’t have time to play with blocks, you know we’re in trouble. These days if kids are outdoors, they’re playing organized sports. They’re not playing in the park or even in their own backyards. They’re not playing pickup games at the playground, except maybe basketball in city neighborhoods. An exclusive soccer club in Michigan actually brought in a personal trainer to devise a program to make sure their athletes were coordinated, because, as their director of coaching explained to me, kids used to become coordinated by climbing trees and jumping fences, riding bikes, falling off them, and learning how to get up again. But today’s kids aren’t doing those things, because their parents aren’t comfortable letting them play alone outside, as we grownups did when we were young. The kids are dropped off and picked up at practice in a car, and they’re never out of their parents’ or their coaches’ sight. I encourage parents to let their kids play outside again and point out that the fear of abduction is overblown. I found that even kids who live in secure, gated communities or safe small towns in the Midwest were not playing outdoors, which tells me this fear is coming from something deep in our culture apart from realistic threats. There are important things kids learn from play, including conflict resolution and how to interact with people you don’t know as well as the guys on your team. Independent play develops creativity and independence, which we should be promoting in our children. I think parents should let their kids play on their own and make up their own games, instead of always having an adult there to tell them what to do. And if parents are worried about safety, they can always check in with their kids via cell phone. I also had no idea until I wrote this book that recess is an endangered species in pubic schools around the country. Seven to thirteen percent of U.S. elementary schools have no scheduled recess. And only 36 percent of states require P.E. for elementary school students. So kids aren’t playing and running around at school as much as they used to either. As for putting play back into sports, that’s exactly what the leaders of the youth sports reform movement want to do. Youth sports has changed from being about fun and participation and skill development for everyone to being a star system that weeds out the weaker players and supports the few top players. What can parents do now? They can seek out coaches who value fun and play. My son has a wonderful soccer coach who lets the boys play Aussie rules football for the last half hour of practice some days—sometimes as a reward for working hard and sometimes, when the practice isn-t going well, because he detects that the kids are burned out and could use a change of pace. And he even spent one practice a season for just Aussie rules football as a treat, and the boys would really look forward to it. At my son’s baseball practices, sometimes his coach will let the boys play three-flies-up or pickle or have a home run derby, bringing that playground feeling into a serious training session. The kids always appreciate anything that breaks the routine of practice and constant drills and the underlying pressure to win. Another thing parents can do if they value play is to try to make sure their kids have some downtime in their schedules for unstructured play. And they can get out and play with them. Throw the ball around, or a Frisbee, or build a sand castle or take a hike in the woods. And parents should remember that kids play sports primarily to have fun. It’s the adults who sometimes start to think it’s all about winning.
| 
