Parenting athletes: get out of the way in which and let ’em play

Youth sport was once about recess, enjoyable and dirt-stained knees. Now it’s a billion-dollar trade with rankings, non-public coaches and “high-performance” coaching earlier than puberty.

So who’s actually driving this machine?

At the moment’s visitor, Paul GamblePhD, has spent his profession making ready elite and worldwide athletes. However after years inside skilled sport, he began asking an uncomfortable query: Are we creating higher athletes—or simply burning youngsters out earlier?

In his e book, Sport Parenting, Paul introduces the concept of the Sport Father or mother, a strong, usually invisible power shaping sport greater than governing our bodies, and even coaches. Whether or not you’re a mother or father, a former youth athlete or somebody who nonetheless has emotional scars from PE class, this dialog hits near dwelling.

We’re speaking about early specialization, the rise of “untimely professionalism,” why fashionable youngsters are literally changing into much less athletic, and the way well-meaning adults could also be buying and selling their youngsters’ long-term confidence and love of motion for short-term outcomes.

This isn’t an episode about blaming mother and father. It’s about unpacking how a tradition obsessive about efficiency turns play into stress—and what it prices youngsters, sport and, finally, all of us.

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