The sports landscape has changed dramatically over the past thirty five years:
Youth sports are creating serious social problems: rape by athletes, violence toward other players and non-athletes [5], coaches bending eligibility rules, adults setting terrible examples by physically and verbally abusing kids, coaches, officials and other adults. Steroid use among high school athletes has grown by 67% since 1971, leaving users with severe and lasting physical and psychological problems. Childhood obesity and Type II diabetes have reached epidemic levels as more and more children abandon the playground or sports field for the comfort of their couches and Play Stations.
Not so long ago stories about attacks on referees by coaches, parents or even young athletes were rare. Now there are half a dozen reports of such incidents each week. While the media continues to blame parents, out-of-control parents are much more a reflection of the deep structural problems in today’s youth sports; a symptom of the disease, not the disease itself. The real problem is much more fundamental: all too often youth sports today is not about kids playing sports, it is about how adults are manipulating the system to serve their own interests: the game within the game.
Sports continue to be a world of tough guys. Tough guys aren't supposed to get hurt or die. Children, like their professional counterparts, are expected to play, no matter what happens to their developing bones, brains [6] and psyches. If they don’t, they risk losing their place on the roster and, too often, deprived of a chance to play at all. Potentially fatal concussions [7] are too often trivialized with comments like, “He just got his bell rung.”
As mothers feel pressured to try to pack more and more activities into the lives of their children even such seemingly straightforward tasks as registering a child for a youth sports program and getting their child to practices and games on time, in uniform, and properly nourished and equipped, is becoming more difficult and adding to the already stressful lives of both parent and child.
While much has changed, what has not changed is the hardwired instinct of mothers to want to nurture and protect their children from harm. But instead of continuing to serve as the primary guardians of our children at play – hanging out a city window to check on our kids’ play in the street below, or looking into the backyard to monitor a group of ten-year old kids playing touch football – today’s mothers are usually found sitting in the stands, working behind the concession counter selling snacks and raffle tickets, working as team administrators, or chauffeuring their kids to and from practice and games.
The puzzling absence of women coaches in youth sports, as Scott Lancaster, former director of the National Football League’s youth football program, noted in his book, Fair Play: Making Organized Sports a Great Experience for Your Kid, is “clearly one of the most backward traditions in sports today.” Yet, as a recent study and upcoming book on the subject find, sadly, the male-dominated culture of sports, outdated gender stereotypes, and overt and unconscious sexist attitudes still conspire to thwart the efforts of women to break into the coaching ranks at the youth and college level.
Not surprisingly, the uncomfortable feeling many mothers have that they could do something about our runaway youth sports culture if only given the chance to be more than team moms is reflected in the e-mails I receive at MomsTeam; many from mothers who wake up in the middle night worried sick not only about what sports are doing to their kids but to themselves; e-mails seeking advice about what, if anything, they can do about it.
The thousands upon thousands of e-mails I have received from sports mothers over the years suggest that:
I will never forget one Christmas Day receiving an e-mail from Sam, a well known former professional athlete. He was struggling to understand why this website was directed to sports mothers. He asked me whether assigning certain characteristics to men and women was to “skate on thin ice,” as he believed youth sports could be made “safer, saner, less stressful and more inclusive” (the MomsTeam mission) only if “all points of view [were] embraced and seriously considered.” Sam wanted to know how I saw the “pieces of the puzzle fitting together to get a complete picture.”
I wasn’t prompted to keep the e mail because it came from a prominent former professional athlete, but because it came from someone who not only knew that a big piece was missing from the youth sports puzzle but, without even realizing it, what that missing piece was: the views, concerns and more active participation of youth sports mothers, not just as team moms but in leadership positions as coaches and administrators.
What, then, do sports mothers want? What are their concerns?
From the tens of thousands of e-mails I have received over the last 12 years, from my conversations with mothers all across the country, including the mothers of many Olympic athletes, I believe that, First, and foremost, the vast majority of mothers (and many fathers, of course) just want to make youth sports fun again, to know that everything possible is being done to protect their children from injury and abuse and given a chance to play until they graduate high school; that if it is no longer safe for our children to learn baseball or soccer on their own on the neighborhood sandlot, the organized sports program in which we enroll our child – the “village” – will protect them and keep them safe while they are entrusted to their care. It isn’t just the safety of our own children we care about: as mothers we care about the well-being of all children.
Second, I am convinced that many mothers (and forward-thinking fathers) believe the time as come to challenge the assumption that, for better or worse, competition in youth sports must defined solely or even primarily in terms of winning and losing, and displays of power, dominance and control. Instead, many want our children to learn that while competition is healthy and necessary (at least after they have developed a mature understanding of what competition means at around age twelve [10]), a successful competition is one where all players contribute, do their best, and respect their teammates, opponents and the rules.
Third, I believe many mothers want the culture of youth sports to include a mother’s perspective and celebrate the values of women as much as men. As natural communicators and nurturers, mothers, I believe, are in the best position to inspire coaches, parents, athletic directors, school boards, and local and national youth sports organizations to do more to keep children safe, to balance competition with cooperation and connectedness, and to think about sports not just as a place to showcase the gifted and talented but as a place where all of our children can begin a love affair with sports and physical exercise lasting a lifetime, instead of ending, as too often is the case, in burnout in early adolescence.
Women, particularly mothers, as Scott Lancaster noted in Fair Play, are “the greatest untapped resource in youth sports.” In order to tap the incredible resource that the 42 million mothers of kids in sports represent, I believe the key is for mothers to become educated about the youth sports environment, and through such education empowered to act and act now.
Only by reclaiming their natural role as guardians of our children at play and confidently stepping onto the out-of-control playground of today’s youth sports to assume leadership roles as coaches and administrators can women and mothers not only protect their children from needless injury playing sports but help break down the gender stereotypes and attitudes in youth sports, atttidues that serve to reinforce the sexist division of labor and leadership that remains so pervasive in both the family and the workplace.
Brooke de Lench is the Founder and Publisher of MomsTEAM.com and the author of Home Team Advantage: The Critical Role of Mothers in Youth Sports (HarperCollins), now available as an e-book [11] on Amazon.com.
Updated July 15, 2012
Links:
[1] https://momsteam.com/node/414
[2] https://momsteam.com/node/780
[3] https://momsteam.com/node/407
[4] https://momsteam.com/node/316
[5] https://momsteam.com/node/1121
[6] https://momsteam.com/node/163
[7] https://momsteam.com/node/1616
[8] https://momsteam.com/node/1049
[9] https://momsteam.com/node/1059
[10] https://momsteam.com/node/1125
[11] http://www.amazon.com/Home-Team-Advantage-Critical-Mothers/dp/B001G8WPWG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1342100203&sr=8-1&keywords=Home Team Advantage
[12] https://momsteam.com/team-parents/coaching/why-women-make-great-youth-sports-coaches
[13] https://momsteam.com/team-parents/women-coaches-and-administrators-reversing-the-decline-in-numbers
[14] https://momsteam.com/team-of-experts/moms-as-coaches-the-missing-piece-of-the-youth-sports-puzzle