Simplicity Parenting (28 page)

I’m exaggerating a bit, for effect. But just a bit. This pressure is real,
and it drives us. It drives us in ways large and small, and affects our children in ways we would rather not acknowledge. If we’re exhausted by our daily “event planning” duties, surely they feel pressured, too, pressured to come through with increasingly enthusiastic and grateful responses. Yet when “rainbow moments” are the norm, children can grow accustomed to one peak experience after another. Their feelings and responses become muted. When every note is a high note, children lose the ability to fully engage in the present and to regulate their own time.

“How was your day?” When your child answers “Regular,” or “Average,” do you feel a sense of disappointment? Even if your day, too, was quite ordinary? Ordinary days are the sustaining notes of daily life. They are the notes that allow high notes to be high and low notes to be low; they provide tone and texture. If a child’s happiness is not hinged on the high notes—not hinged on exceptional events
or
having exceptional talents—then they have a true gift. An exceptional character. They may be able to live their life with an appreciation for the moment, for the simple pleasures of an ordinary day. Can you imagine anything better?

Sports

Each year more than fifty-two million American children participate in organized sports leagues, according to the National Council of Youth Sports.
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That number has risen significantly over the last decade or two. In just about every sport, there’s been an increase. And children are starting younger than ever. The American Youth Soccer Organization, a nonprofit group that sponsors soccer programs, changed its starting age to four rather than five years old. Many organized sports programs—soccer, basketball, T-ball, and others—are now sponsoring teams and leagues for toddlers as young as eighteen months.
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With traveling, summer, and year-round leagues, organized sports for children are getting more complicated, competitive, and demanding. This is what’s known as the “professionalization” of children’s sports, and with it often comes premature specialization. It used to be that if children were athletic, they might do several sports, for a few months out of the year. Increasingly now, children concentrate on a single sport, working out and joining traveling leagues in the off-season, honing their skills in specialty camps and extra leagues in the summer.

“There’s pretty good research out there that says that you need about 10 years and 10,000 hours of practice to become really expert at a sport,” says Dan Gould, the director of the Michigan State University Institute for the Study of Youth Sports. “The trouble is, parents hear these kinds of things, and they try to get it all in the first two years.”
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Across the country, pediatric doctors are seeing injuries they’ve never seen before in children. According to Dr. James Andrews, a nationally prominent sports orthopedist, “You get a kid on the operating table and you say to yourself, ‘It’s impossible for a 13-year-old to have this kind of wear and tear.’”
The New York Times
reported that in interviews with more than two dozen sports medicine doctors and researchers, the factor that was repeatedly mentioned as the primary cause for the sharp rise in overuse injuries among young athletes was “specialization in one sport at an early age and the year-round, almost manic, training for it that often follows.”
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The understandable outcome of this push toward professionalism—or, the “too much, too fast, and too young” of sports—is burnout. Plenty of media attention has been given to the growing number of kids in organized sports, and the ways in which youth sports increasingly mimic professional sports. But there’s been less notice of how many kids take an “early retirement” from organized sports. Data indicates that sports participation peaks at age eleven and is followed by steady decline through the remainder of the teen years. According to studies reported in the
Journal of Physical Education, Recreation & Dance
, 35 percent of participants withdraw each year from organized sports, while up to 67 percent of participants drop out of sports between the ages of seven and eighteen.
¹⁰
The
Journal of Sport Behavior
reported that by tenth grade, more than 90 percent of high school sophomores had dropped out of an organized sport they’d started.
¹¹

There is much to be concerned about here: from overscheduled kids to overzealous parents, from overuse injuries to the overemphasis on competition that leaves some kids sitting on the bench. The Josephson Institute of Ethics found in its Sportsmanship Survey that 72 percent of both boys and girls say they would rather play on a team with a losing record than sit on the bench for a winning team.
¹²

Kids just want to play. It’s simple, isn’t it? It usually starts out that way, at least. Many families become involved in youth leagues—turning their schedules inside out, giving up family dinners, evening and weekend time—because they believe sports programs to be safe, regulated, refereed, and skill-building venues for play. But with so many adults involved,
from coaches to refs to parents, play—active play for the sake of fun—can be benched, too, sitting out the game.

I want to clarify that I’m not against organized sports or martial arts for children; I am against the too-much-of-it, and far-too-young way we’ve embraced it. When I speak of the problems with early sport, I’m referring to children younger than ten or eleven years old who are playing formal team sports or engaged in martial arts and training more than twice a week. My concerns are compounded if the nature of the coaching is forceful or aggressive and if competition routs building friendships and fun.

Within this context—the too-much and too-young of it—I place martial arts right alongside organized sports. This is a very unpopular position to take, I understand, as I imagine thousands of white-uniform-clad children, elbows up and wide-stanced, arrayed before me. I am not against martial arts per se, just as I am not against sports … or toys for that matter. I am against the way that we’ve transposed adult endeavors—with an adult sense of competition, fanaticism, and consumerism—into children’s lives. To do so we largely cut these disciplines off from their cultural and spiritual contexts. An art form designed to train an adolescent mentally, physically, and spiritually for adulthood becomes a hobby. Belts become trophies, and very young children are equipped with “skills” long before they have the maturity to use them wisely.

But clearly it’s the developmental issues that concern me most about our love affair with organized sports and martial arts. Something is amiss at both ends of the age spectrum. When kids younger than ten or eleven become occupied with organized sports, especially to the exclusion of time for free, unstructured play, that involvement can cut crudely across their progression through a variety of play stages that are vitally important to their development. Equally disheartening is the fact that so many kids are quitting as they approach adolescence, just when the structure and rigors of organized sports and martial arts have so much to offer them in their quest for individuality, independence, and maturity.

Let’s look at the fundamental differences between organized sports and play, differences that I’d like to address by turning our attention from one to the other, like a ball lobbing back and forth.

On one side of the net is organized sports (Little League, soccer leagues, etc.) or karate classes, and on the other is unstructured play (running around, or a pickup game in the neighborhood or at the park). First of all, I don’t believe this is an either/or competition. I also don’t
think it’s a game that’s already been played. Some parents feel that sports have taken the place of unstructured play these days; that free play is no longer possible, a thing of the past. We’ll talk a bit more in Chapter Six about “stranger danger” and other fears that are driving parents and kids into their cars and out of the neighborhood to formal games or classes. Keeping to our present focus on schedules, let’s look at organized sports and unstructured play in terms of what they offer your child developmentally.

Three little guys, ages five to seven, are playing with small cars and an improvised ramp by the side of the driveway. There is a lot of arguing going on. “No, but, he said I could use the red car first and my turn includes four jumps, but on my last jump it fell off the side, so that doesn’t count.” In fact, the cars are often sidelined or in the shop while these important details are discussed, arranged, ignored, and rearranged. In play, children freely negotiate the rules, are actively involved in the social process, learning as they make their way. In sport, the rules already exist, and children instead learn how to play within predetermined boundaries.

With these elements—some space (a yard, or a park), some kids, and possibly some things to climb on or to hide behind—fun can develop when imaginations are exercised. “Whattayawannado?” may be the familiar starting point, but things develop from there. Today’s progression to fun may be repeated, built on, or changed tomorrow, or it might be “archived” and resurrected another day. In sport, the picture of what is needed—in terms of equipment, and the nature of the game—is already determined. How the game plays out may vary, but the game itself is defined.

So much of imagination is mental picture making. Free play requires forming a “picture” of what’s possible, a pictorial answer to the proverbial “Whattayawannado?” question. But in play there are also many possible outcomes. “We were going to have our beautiful tea party for the dolls, but then Emily slid down the hill by the rabbit hutch and then we all started sliding. At first it made me mad because of the tea party, but then we got cardboard and slid really fast on that, and then we made sleds for the dolls, too, and it was so funny to see them race down the hill!” This multiplicity of outcomes—beyond the win-or-lose of sports—builds an inner flexibility. In a general sense, kids learn, through the practice of play, not to be too attached to their vision of what to do or of what might happen.

In free play, children have to actively problem solve and to take one another’s feelings into account if the play is to be successful.
Success
in free play means simply that the game continues, and continues to be fun. Sometimes this problem solving is external, sometimes internal. “What should I do if this is, like, the coolest game ever, but Alex doesn’t want to crash the cars? It’s no fun without him, and plus, he’d take the red car with him if he goes.” When everyone has a stake in the play, feelings must be taken into account. In sport, the problem solving is largely extrinsic, facilitated by coaches, referees, or parents.

Because play is self-created and self-motivated it has great flexibility. There are roles and positions in play for whatever “type” a child believes himself to be, or wants to be. Why? Because kids make the play up as they go along, projecting themselves and their wishes into it. Because they create them, the roles and positions of the game serve their needs, whether those needs are deeply felt or of the moment. In sport, you are given a predetermined role or position to play. Ironically, that position may become even more restrictive (“But Mary
has
to be goalie!”) the better you become at it.

Unstructured play is usually varied over the long haul, driven by the changing interests of the child and of his or her playmates. It provides a broad, multidimensional foundation of movement for later specialization. In sport, there is more of an emphasis on early specialization, with the physical risks inherent in a narrow set of repetitive movements. Speaking of repetitive motion, another difference is that play is portable; participation in organized sports, on the other hand, usually involves a committed, back-and-forth parental shuttle service.

Some believe that organized sports are vital preparation for an increasingly competitive world: kids should build skills and learn how to “play the game,” the earlier the better. Yet, children construct their worldviews through play. Organized sports can present a “packaged world” of set rules and procedures to very young children, rather than a world of their own making. We’ve underestimated free, unstructured play. As a society we’ve discounted the developmental riches involved in
what kids do naturally. Self-directed play builds multiple and emotional intelligences. It fosters the skills necessary to navigate an uncertain future, one that will demand increasing flexibility and creative problem solving. Play is not an old-fashioned thing of the past. Unstructured play—and plenty of it—is a developmental necessity for kids. Some might say now more than ever.

For families with kids younger than eight or nine years of age, schedules can be simplified tremendously just by emphasizing free play over organized sports and martial arts. First, consider how much time you spend each week, driving to and attending training, practices, meets, and games. Imagine devoting a similar amount of time at the park, or wherever kids gather to play near your home. Very often it is the same park you frequented a few years ago, when your kids were toddlers, before the mass exodus to tae kwon do and T-ball when the kids turned four and five. There may not be a lot of grade-school-age kids at the park now, but think of this as a resource—for your kids and the community—that you are helping to develop. The word will get out through the neighborhood grapevine, and kids will return. Plan to take the newspaper, or a book. Plan to get something done or read while being a benign parental presence: easy to ignore, but available should the need arise. The rest will evolve on its own in the democracy of the playground, with its ever-changing participants and games.