Why Do Parents Obsess Over Kids’ Athletics?

Illustration: Hannah Buckman

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The school year has ended and with it its practice schedules and playoffs, but most sports can be year-round if you want them to be, and now the summer leagues begin, along with the clinics and the development camps. We are all familiar with the critiques of the turbocharging of youth sports over the past couple of decades. Critics argue that spending all this time and money on recreational sports that are getting more competitive and overheated is not necessarily good for children. Nevertheless, youth sports culture seems to barrel ahead on its trajectory toward more, faster, and stronger, partly thanks to billions of dollars in private-equity investment. It all must be ultimately worth it, right?

Parents complain about the time and money commitments that even local leagues can require, but they keep participating, which makes me wonder what the lesser-explored reasons for opting into sports parenting might be. Beyond the obvious — kids’ motivation, parents’ pride in their kids’ accomplishments, and enjoyment of a shared activity — what do parents get out of all-encompassing youth-sports culture?

I have always suspected that by getting their kids involved in demanding sports schedules, some parents are willingly trading their free time for an ironclad peace of mind that is hard to find anywhere else. When you spend your weekends ferrying your children to their activities (and this goes beyonds sports — chess team, anyone?), you may sacrifice time for your own pursuits, but you can also silence any nagging sense that you weren’t showing up as a parent. Sports solves the problem of what it even means to show up: You can sit on the bleachers and space out and it counts as having been supportive. In our age of anxious parenting, being a committed sports parent is a path toward absolution of any guilt. You drove to the games, you bought the equipment: peace of mind.

I spoke to some of the sports parents I know about what makes it rewarding despite the time commitment and expense. A mom of two boys under 10 who play ice hockey, baseball, and lacrosse on the West Coast told me running practices as a volunteer coach helps her stay active, and the camaraderie with other parents is real, especially as the years go by. “I get to engage with other people, but we’re focused on the kids and the logistics and the action and nobody is expecting anything else. It takes the pressure off of making conversation, making friends, talking about oneself, the kinds of things that can be stressful in adulthood.” A basketball dad on the East Coast recalled that sports were essential for keeping him focused and centered as a kid, and he’s hoping his children will gain the same sense of identity and confidence. Another basketball dad remarked that the time commitment tends to creep up gradually, and you barely realize you’re becoming a heavily committed sports parent until it’s a done deal.

It’s tempting for an outsider like me to take a cynical approach to sports parenting, assuming that the increased competitiveness and cost is a simple reflection of the acceleration of competition (and the defunding of more easygoing public programming) happening in the rest of civil society. And that’s certainly part of the story. But youth sports is a world unto itself that welcomes parents to enter in and belong to. In the absence of inherited examples for what “family time” looks like, sports provides one.

In the new book What are Children For?, co-written with Anastasia Berg, Rachel Wiseman admits that one of the reasons she wasn’t sure she wanted children is that she had no idea what she’d want her future family to do together. Hers was one of the first articulations I’ve read of something I think a lot about: the processes by which families figure out what their own family culture is going to look like in the absence of faith or of tradition for its own sake.

In Wiseman’s case, her parents — loving and hardworking though they were — hadn’t given her an example for what it looks like to have fun as a family. Theirs was “an insular life that revolved almost entirely around my parents’ careers.” When they did organize family outings or trips, it seemed to young Rachel that her parents were stressed and exhausted. Her parents did everything to facilitate her and her sister’s happiness except model what that happiness might look like. She writes, “With extended family far away, and our nuclear family spread thin, there was little in the way of shared traditions or mutual experience for us to fall back on.”

Wiseman references the philosopher Agnes Callard’s concept of “acceptance parenting,” in which parents invite their children to define happiness for themselves rather than imposing it through values and practices of their own. This contemporary flavor of parenting is seen as a way to avoid alienating your kids by letting them be the ones to decide what’s fun and interesting. Acceptance parenting is also a natural byproduct of parenting while overworked: Sign the kids up for as many activities as possible and hope something sticks. “Instead of moral guides,” writes Wiseman, “parents become talent scouts and trend forecasters in their own homes, doing their best to expose their children to as many activities and opportunities as possible.” Meanwhile, “kids are left to deduce the deeper, unarticulated expectations of the adults through shrouded patterns and signs.”

Acceptance parenting, in Wiseman’s view, can create a “tractionless” feeling for children, “like a wheel spinning in a void.” Becoming a sports family seems like an insurance policy against this tractionless feeling for kids and parents alike. It’s a way of raising your children with structure and discipline without alienating them by insisting on following traditions that might seem arbitrary and unfair.

Wiseman ultimately changed her mind and decided having a family was appealing to her, in part because she watched close friends figuring it out themselves and took heart in what she saw. If you have the luxury of time and energy, making up your own family culture can be a creative adventure, a world-making project where your kids will join in with whatever you’re into, at least for a little while. No less of a world is being made in sports organizations, and they offer the benefit of established rules and rituals, which lets parents off the hook from having to conjure rules and rituals from scratch.

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