Individual sports or competitive?  Recreational or organized?  Everyone gets a trophy or just the winners?

And why do sports in the first place?  Granted there are some physical benefits, but don’t we also hope that our children will learn some kind of lessons about persistence and team work that will stand them in good stead in the future?

In this interview with Dr. Hilary Levy Friedman we discuss her book https://www.amazon.com/Playing-Win-Raising-Children-Competitive/dp/0520276760 (Playing to Win: Raising Children in a Competitive Culture), the advantages that sports can confer on children (which might not be the ones you expect!), as well as what children themselves think about these issues.



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Jen: 01:23 Hello and welcome to today's episode of Your Parenting Mojo podcast, and today's episode actually comes to us courtesy of a question from my husband who said “You should really do an episode on the benefits of sports for children.” And I said, sure and I said about researching it and I actually stumbled on Dr. Hilary Levey Friedman’s book Playing to Win: Raising Children in a Competitive Culture, and I really got more than I bargained for with that book. Dr. Friedman has studied not just the advantages and drawbacks associated with participation in sport as an activity, but also much broader sociological issues like how participation in sports helped children to increase what she calls Competitive Kid Capital and can actually impact the child's academic and lifelong success. So, Dr. Friedman received her Bachelor's Degree from Harvard and Master’s in Philosophy from the University of Cambridge and a Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University. She's currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Education at Brown University and is the mother of a preschooler and a first grader. Welcome Dr. Friedman.
Dr. Friedman: 02:24 Thanks for having me.
Jen: 02:25 You're right there in the thick of it with us.
Dr. Friedman: 02:27 Yes.
Jen: 02:29 So, I want to kind of start at the beginning or what seems like the beginning to me here because decades ago it seems as though it was far more common for children to engage in really unstructured outdoor playtime rather than organized sports. I'm curious as to your thoughts on what has shifted here and what do you think children are missing out by not having as much of this unstructured outdoor play?
Dr. Friedman: 02:51 Well, it depends what time we're talking about. I mean if we’re talking about 200 years ago, I mean kids were working in the fields and 50 years after that, they were working in factories. So about a hundred years ago, 1918, we're seeing the formation of kids' athletic leagues in particular and also some other organized activities, but it's really more of like a popular myth or a misconception that kids use to spend all this time playing and having free time. The 1950s, which is that time we sort of pulled up is this Utopian time of kids playing in the streets and playing stickball and baseball and all of that is more the anomaly rather than the norm. So, today it is absolutely true that kids spend so much more time, especially, it depends on what age exactly we're talking about, but they spend a lot of time in organized play, not just in organized sports, but we just have to think about the ways in which that took a different shape historically in American childhood.
Jen: 03:56 Yeah. Yeah. So, it's less that they were always able to engage in this unstructured play and whether that was sort of a phenomenon of its time just like the structured play as a phenomenon of its time today.
Dr. Friedman: 04:07 Yes.
Jen: 04:08 Do you think there are unique benefits associated with that unstructured time that maybe children are not able to realize today through the structured play that happens?
Dr. Friedman: 04:17 Again, I think it depends on the age group we're talking about, so I'll limit it to elementary school aged kids just because that's...