Blowing the whistle on kiddie sports

AN AWFUL SUSPICION has begun to dawn on me: My 3-year-old daughter may possess genuine athletic talent.

I suppose there were warning signs. This is a child who bounces on the sofa for hours, refuses to be carried on hikes, and even insists on somersaulting into bed at night.

Like any sane parent, I tried to suppress her thirst for sports. When she begged me to enroll her in kiddie gymnastics classes with her nursery school friends, I lied and told her the Little Gym had closed down and reopened as an auto repair shop.

I encouraged her to take up sedentary activities such as macrame and solitaire. But young children can be very devious. She tied the macrame yarn into a rope and used it to climb a tree, and she turned the playing cards into Frisbees.

At wits’ end, I supplied her with video games and junk food, hoping she’d at least get fatter and slower. But she outwitted me once more. She put a video game box under each foot and scooted across the carpet, claiming she was ice skating. She used the marshmallows as baseballs and the Twinkies as bats.

If I seem severe, it’s for her own good. In and of themselves, her activities may be innocuous (though we’re still cleaning squashed “baseballs” out of the carpet). But it’s like drugs: The soft ones lead inexorably to the harder stuff.

First it’s “Mommy and Me” baby yoga. Then it’s those cute preschool gym classes. All this may seem innocent, but don’t kid yourself. Next thing you know, it’s organized youth sports. T-ball. Little League. Hockey. And, of course, soccer: the crack cocaine of kiddie sports.

OK, maybe I’m exaggerating a little bit. But don’t you think youth sports are starting to feel like a national epidemic? University of Michigan researchers found that participation by 3- to 12-year-olds in structured sports jumped more than 225% in the 20th century’s last two decades. One Boston study found that by the late 1990s, 85% to 90% of suburban children participated in organized sports.

And don’t think it’s just the kids who participate: Regrettably, few states offer driver’s licenses to 8-year-olds, so each of these junior Olympians requires a chauffeur to get him or her to daily practices -- not to mention a gas-guzzling minivan to hold costly athletic equipment. Has it occurred to anyone that youth sports are responsible for the oil crisis?

For years, youth sports pushers tried to get us hooked: Organized sports, they said, offered a natural high and would build character in our children. And it’s true that organized youth sports work out fine for some families. But there are high-functioning cokeheads too. Like every American, I have close friends whose families struggle with a youth sports addiction. So let’s talk about the dark side of the youth sports epidemic.

First off, when they’re spending every spare second at soccer practice, children lose that crucial downtime they need for exercising their imaginations, as well as their limbs. And Dr. Lenny Wiersma, co-director of the Center for the Advancement of Responsible Youth Sport, warns that when kids miss out on “the old sandbox and informal games,” they also lose opportunities to develop peer interactions that are “organized and regulated by themselves.”

Like secondhand smoke, a child’s involvement in youth sports can have detrimental side effects on others. The Michigan study cited above also found a sixfold increase in the time children spent on “passive, spectator leisure,” as more and more kids found themselves dragged off to watch their siblings’ sports events.

Organized youth sports also cut into relaxed family time. The same study found that families today spend a third less time eating dinners together, and 28% less time taking family vacations. That’s not to speak of all the exhausted parents who put their own interests -- and relationships -- on hold for a decade, devoting every free minute to hauling their kids from game to game.

Of course, organized sports isn’t the only culprit. It’s just one reflection of the middle-class American insistence on over-scheduling our children, rushing them between soccer practices, piano lessons, French lessons and SAT prep classes.

The pressure can leave even high-achieving kids exhausted, demoralized and at risk of “self-destructive behaviors,” Harvard’s admissions office warns. Harvard now urges that applicants “take some sort of timeout before burnout becomes the hallmark of their generation.” Parents: Just say no. Rip up that T-ball signup sheet; throw out the expensive soccer cleats. If you want an activity that develops character and physical skills, encourage the kids to help build houses with Habitat for Humanity.

But the rest of the time, let them do what generations of American children did before them: climb trees, build backyard forts, play hopscotch and endless games of tag. It’s time to give childhood back to our children.