This sounds like a good book — “Until It Hurts: America’s Obsession with Youth Sports,” by Mark Hyman.
Apparently Hyman’s 14-year-old son came home with an arm super-sore from playing too much baseball, too hard. Hyman told the boy to get out there and pitch again — after all, it was the playoffs. Just a few years later, the kid ended up in surgery. Sports injury. For his part, the dad ended up with an epiphany: There is no reason to push our offspring to this point.
So he examines how sports went from something spontaeous and fun to something organized and grueling. Of course this entails figuring out how we parents got so overinvolved. And he shares some shocking stats, too, like the fact that in 2003 alone, 3.5 million children under age 15 required medical treatment for sports injuries, “nearly half of which were the result of simple overuse. The quest to turn children into tomorrow’s superstar athletes has often led adults to push them beyond physical and emotional limits.”
Not good!
Free-Range Kids is pro kids sports, but not pro pro-kids sports, if you get my drift. We are not eager to make our kids into pros, or to enroll them in so many coaching programs so many days a week that that they can outswim Michael Phelps, but have no idea how to organize their own game of tag.
Sounds like this author came to the same conclusion, the hard way. — Lenore
How parents have taken the fun out of games
Rarely has a book left me feeling so conflicted. Part confession, part cautionary tale, Mark Hyman's little book carries a big message about the "hostile takeover" of youth sports by adults. "Until It Hurts" is a must read, but it's not an easy read. We're likely to see ourselves, but unlikely to like what we see.
Parents, understandably, are loath to admit that their vision of youth sports, no matter how well intentioned, has gone terribly awry in many cases. "With each passing season youth sports seems to stray further and further from its core mission of providing healthy, safe, and character-building recreation for children. Rather, sports for kids has evolved (and devolved) into a playground for those who invited themselves to the games and, like irritating dinner guests, refuse to leave the party - parents, coaches, and other interested adults," writes Hyman. "It's not the presence of adults that is distorting youth sports. Rather, the issue is our well-documented impulse to turn sports for children into a de facto professional league."
Hyman has a field day with the documentation he's unearthed. First, he points out that the adultification of youth sports is hardly a new phenomenon. "By the mid-1950s, a full-blown debate had broken out among academics, physicians, and plain old adults arguing thorny issues such as who should be in charge and how competitive games for children should be."
He skewers one of our national treasures, Little League, as a poster child of all that's wrong with youth sports, from soaring injury rates among prized pitching prospects to a child's game being usurped in the name of big-money network entertainment.
What lends Hyman's admonitions such chilling credibility is his willingness to lay bare his own foibles. He opens the book with a stark portrait of his son, Ben, only 18 months old, bundled up to his eyeballs on a midwinter day. In his hands, a plastic baseball bat. "On an ideal day for ice fishing, my toddler was in the yard taking batting practice. Whose idea was it to hone the swing of a toddler in the dead of winter? Mine. What was I thinking?"
Such candor is compelling and engaging. It can also provide a soapbox for the converted.
Hyman presents numerous examples to prove his point that today's youth sports environment creates a litany of problems for the participants, including injury (physical, psychological, and emotional), burnout, cheating, familial dysfunction, eating disorders, drug abuse, even legal wrangling and the rise of pathetic "disappointment lawsuits."
Still, Hyman's examples begin to border on redundancy midway through the book. The anecdotal avalanche also buries any sense of balance.
Hyman clearly has an agenda, which is fine; he states, without apology, that his intent is to fuel the debate on youth sports. The problem, however, is that his claims are so one-sided at times that they undermine a very valid position. Worse, Hyman sometimes ignores or dismisses points that don't fit his argument. He refers to a Sports Illustrated for Kids survey that reports 74 percent of children witnessed "out-of-control adults at their games," which included "parents yelling at officials, and coaches and parents yelling at children." But Hyman doesn't define what that "yelling" or criticism is.
Hyman also barely mentions the passing of a more carefree way of life. This is not the age of innocence for youth sports, but it's no walk in the ballpark for parents, either. The irony, of course, is that while parents have reshaped youth sports apparently to their liking, they're not having any more fun. In fact, they're often angry.
All, however, is not lost. Hyman offers intriguing illustrations of diverse programs that work, including Indiana's groundbreaking Wildcat Baseball League ("Everybody makes the team").
"Until It Hurts" is a candid, if sometimes incomplete, indictment of youth sports today. Whatever the book's shortcomings, they shouldn't overshadow the author's essential message: Youth sports need fixing. Let the debate continue.
Boston-based writer Brion O'Connor, a longtime sports fan and a father who coaches both youth soccer and youth hockey, can be reached at brionoc@verizon.net.