Youth Sport-Adult Directed Syndrome
Youth Sport Directed Syndrome
There have been so many changes in the field of youth sport that not only would it be hard to list them it seems impossible to determine the long range effects of these changes. But the short range effects do not look to good.
Today the youth of our nation is so over-coached and directed by adults one has to wonder how our children can think at all.
Gone are the playgrounds and parks where kids worked out their differences between themselves. Gone are the pick-up games where children refereed their own games and decided if a ball was fair or foul and made their own lineups. Can you imagine?
Given the current state of youth-directed sport I cannot imagine how we ever chose up sides and played so many sports and games without adult assistance or direction.
What is perplexing about the whole thing is that for the most part it is the baby-boomer generation who played so freely and creatively who ushered in the “youth sport adult directed syndrome” we have today.
How did we get here? The exodus to the suburbs surely had something to do with it. I think the economic affluence of this generation also had something to do with it. Children of today have so many more things than the baby-boomer generation. Perhaps it can be blamed on technology. Let’s face it you do not have to go to far today to be connected to another human being. If you are reading this then you are connected, or at least have the capacity to be connected.
How does the mindset of a free thinking generation create a generation that appears to be less active, less productive in creating new and different games to play? I am not sure.
