The Downsides of Having an Athlete in the Family
These days, middle-class families run ragged by their kids’ competitive-sports schedules are achingly common across America: Weekends are devoured by tournaments and practice, family dinners replaced by mandatory strength-training sessions, and vacations forever postponed. During my five years of researching and writing about youth sports for my book Take Back the Game, I heard so many variations of these stories, and the burden on burned-out teenagers is clear. Less obvious is the effect of relentless overtraining on the rest of the household. In the ever-earlier scramble to develop their kids’ athletic skills, mothers and fathers frequently find themselves giving up the integrity of the family as a whole.
In my observation, this is most common among that shows how exercise and sports benefit children, comparatively little research exists on the costs of competitive youth sports participation to the unpaid support network that enables it—specifically, the young athletes’ families. What of the marriages, siblings, and extended relatives who are pulled in or dragged along or left out when one child takes up soccer or tennis with gusto, and the parents go all in? Besides so much else that’s wrong with contemporary elite youth sports—the prohibitive cost, erosion of fun, epidemic of injuries—disrupted families should be added to the list.
