The Adulteration of Children's Sports
Subtitle
Waning Health and Wellbeing in the Age of Organized Play
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.
Bio
Kristi Erdal is a professor of psychology at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Dr. Erdal has taught Sport Psychology, Research Design, Human Neuropsychology, and Abnormal Psychology for 27 years, and has published in the sport fields of sport superstition, sport concussion, and stereotyping of athletes. She received her A.B. in psychology with honors from Brown University, where she was a collegiate long jumper, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Arizona State University, where she was also a USA Track and Field official. Dr. Erdal completed her clinical internship at the University of Missouri Medical School and was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Bergen in Norway. Perhaps equally important, she is the mother of sons who played basketball, baseball, soccer, football, and track and field.
Praise for this book
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.
The Sport Psychologist
What an eye-opening book. Dr. Erdal clearly explains the latest research—hers and other scientists'—about how today's intense, competitive, over-organized and ‘adulterated’ approach to children's sports is failing so many of our children and having a rather unfortunate effect on the behavior of parents and coaches too. Helpfully, she also offers practical and scientifically valid suggestions for improving how we recruit, coach and encourage young players. Essential reading for parents, coaches, researchers and, really, anyone involved with children's sports.
Gretchen Reynolds New York Times
