The Adulteration of Childrens Sports
Waning Health and Well-Being in the Age of Organized Play
By (author) Kristi Erdal
Publication date:
15 September 2018Length of book:
136 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksISBN-13: 9781498571517
The Adulteration of Children’s Sports explores current behavioral and physiological research about how children’s organized sport has changed; how adults’ goals and needs are at the heart of those changes; and the consequences of those changes on children’s enjoyment of sport and on their autonomy, creativity, and moral reasoning outside of sport. Adult introduction of early competition, extrinsic rewards, early sport specialization, and year-round participation has thwarted children’s intrinsic motivation and contributed to children’s attrition from sport. Kristi Erdal explores concerns about the future of sport itself, as adult-mediated selection practices whittle down young athletes earlier on shakier criteria. Parents’ and coaches’ complicity in these practices, however, is based on intermediaries poorly interpreting (or ignoring) the research literature. Thus, the final chapters of this book are about translating the research into applied ideas for change. Erdal provides an essential introduction to evidence-based research about children’s health and well-being in sport and debunks myths along the way. Adults built the problems compiled in this text. We can dismantle them as well.
Erdal’s commitment to and reliance on research as the primary scaffolding on which this text is based makes for an extremely convincing, compelling, and informative experience for the reader. Each chapter explores a different segment of the youth-sport literature and succeeds in presenting and integrating a variety of studies together in a clear and accessible way. . . .The Adulteration of Children’s Sports is an exciting example of what I see as an important challenge to the problematic shift toward youth-sport programs that prioritize adults at the expense of young athletes.